France-based Zama, which describes itself as an open source cryptography company, on Thursday announced raising $73 million in a Series A funding round.
The investment, which Zama says is one of the largest venture rounds in France’s history, was led by Multicoin Capital and Protocol Labs, with participation from Metaplanet, Blockchange, VSquared, Stake Capital, Portal Ventures, and several angel investors.
The company focuses on fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), which enables the processing of encrypted data without the need to decrypt it. Organizations can leverage FHE to offer their services without actually seeing — and potentially exposing — their users’ data.
Zama says it’s making FHE accessible to developers who don’t have cryptography expertise through a suite of open source libraries and solutions.
“Anyone, from solo developers to large enterprises, can build applications that deliver out-of-the-box, end-to-end encryption to their users,” said Rand Hindi, the CEO of Zama. “Developers don’t need to know anything about cryptography to get started. Our FHE scheme, which builds on top of TFHE, supports any type of application, no matter how complex, vastly expanding the applicability of FHE.”
“Alongside security and developer experience, we maintained an unrelenting focus on performance. Since inception, we have improved the speed of our FHE scheme by a factor of 20x, and are on track to reach 100x soon. This key performance milestone has unlocked critical confidential blockchain and AI use cases,” Hindi added.
Zama’s solutions currently focus on blockchain and artificial intelligence applications, but the firm hopes to expand its use to other fields.
The company’s machine learning solution enables users to add a layer of privacy to workflows, while the AI solution is designed for confidential smart contracts in the blockchain.
Related: Intel Launches New Attestation Service as Part of Trust Authority Portfolio
Related: Google Releases Open Source Tools and Libraries for Fully Homomorphic Encryption
Related: IBM Releases Open Source Toolkits for Processing Data While Encrypted
