Niobium, a company founded in 2021 and based in Dayton, Ohio, recently announced a significant financial milestone, raising $23 million in an oversubscribed funding round. This latest injection of capital increases the total amount the company has raised so far to over $28 million. The startup is focused on a critical area of data security, specifically providing a hardware accelerator designed expressly for fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), which ensures data privacy by allowing computations directly on encrypted data.
The core of Niobium’s offering is a custom PCIe card engineered to dramatically boost the performance of FHE software. By accelerating FHE, the company is enabling a paradigm shift in computing, where data can be actively processed without ever being decrypted. This capability is particularly important given the looming threat posed by the emergence of quantum computing, which is expected to break many of the existing, standard encryption algorithms, putting vast amounts of stored data at risk.
Niobium emphasizes that its specialized hardware accelerator is versatile and designed for easy integration. It offers support for all major FHE schemes currently in use and can be swiftly inserted into any standard server. This ease of implementation allows for rapid integration with customers’ existing workflows. Furthermore, the company asserts that its solution is key to making zero-trust computing (ZTC)—a security model based on the principle of never trusting, always verifying—truly feasible in practice by supporting high-performance encrypted data processing.
The recent funding round saw participation from a mix of new and existing investors. New backers included Blockchange Ventures, ADVentures, Korea Development Bank (KDB), JobsOhio Growth Capital, Rev1 Angels, and Silicon Catalyst Ventures. Prior investors who also participated were Fusion Fund, Morgan Creek Capital, Rev1 Ventures, and the Ohio Innovation Fund. The capital infusion is earmarked for several strategic initiatives crucial to the company’s growth and development.
Specifically, Niobium will use the new funds to accelerate the development of its second-generation FHE platforms, guiding them toward becoming production-ready solutions. Key actions planned include finalizing the production silicon architecture, commencing the building of a production application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), and improving the necessary infrastructure to support early deployments of their technology. As Niobium CEO Kevin Yoder stated, the convergence of AI, quantum computing, and distributed computing has expanded both the possibilities and the risks within the data economy, and Niobium is building the essential hardware foundation for a future where privacy is mathematically guaranteed.
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