French cryptography startup Zama has secured $73 million in a Series A funding round, led by major investors Multicoin Capital and Protocol Labs. The funding will support Zama’s Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) technology, which aims to enable computation on encrypted data without decryption. Zama’s CEO, Rand Hindi, described FHE as the “holy grail of cryptography,” with the goal of making data privacy a standard feature on the internet while still allowing for information processing in operations like cloud computing. Zama’s chief technology officer, Pascal Paillier, compared FHE to a “magical box” where users can put their secret message, lock it, and allow others to perform calculations without ever seeing the actual message. Zama has already onboarded significant clients, including Shiba Inu, which is using Zama’s technology to improve on-chain privacy. The company aims to make FHE more accessible and efficient for developers to use, allowing businesses to leverage cloud computing and other technologies without compromising privacy. Zama’s solution also strikes a balance between on-chain transparency and off-chain privacy, enabling developers to execute confidential smart contracts on encrypted data without sacrificing either confidentiality or composability.
Zama, a startup specializing in cryptography, secures $73M funding to fortify data privacy.