Zama, a French startup specializing in cryptography, has secured $73 million in a Series A funding round to support its ambitious plans of enabling computation on encrypted data without decryption. The funding round, led by industry investors Multicoin Capital and Protocol Labs, aims to promote the use of Zama’s Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) technology. This technology, referred to as the “holy grail of cryptography” by Zama’s CEO Rand Hindi, aims to establish data privacy as a standard feature on the internet while still allowing for information processing in operations such as cloud computing.
Zama’s Chief Technology Officer Pascal Paillier explained that FHE is comparable to a “magical box” in which users can place their secret messages. Once the message is inside the box, it can be locked, allowing others to perform mathematical operations on it without ever seeing the actual content of the message. Zama has already attracted several significant clients since its establishment in 2020, including Shiba Inu, which is utilizing Zama’s technology to create an entire network state. SHIB implemented a new FHE-enabled privacy infrastructure in late February 2024, with the aim of enhancing on-chain privacy.
Paillier highlighted that Zama’s goal is to make FHE more accessible and efficient for developers, empowering businesses to leverage cloud computing and other technologies without compromising on privacy. The company plans to achieve this by creating user-friendly tools, libraries, or platforms that integrate FHE into everyday digital services, making it easier for firms to adopt advanced encryption without requiring specialized knowledge. Additionally, Zama’s solution has successfully overcome the tradeoff between on-chain transparency and off-chain privacy, allowing developers to execute confidential smart contracts on encrypted data without sacrificing either confidentiality or composability.