Zama, an open-source cryptography company based in Paris, has successfully secured a $73 million Series A funding round, spearheaded by Multicoin Capital and Protocol Labs. The investment includes participation from notable entities such as Metaplanet, Blockchange Ventures, VSquared, and Stake Capital, alongside blockchain visionaries like Juan Benet, Anatoly Yakovenko, and Gavin Wood. Zama specializes in Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) solutions, offering developers the unprecedented ability to tackle data privacy challenges across blockchain and AI use cases.
The substantial funds raised will be strategically employed to onboard skilled engineers, software developers, and cryptography researchers. Zama’s primary focus is on maintaining its suite of open-source libraries and collaborating with strategic partners to advance the development of a new class of FHE applications. FHE, hailed as a novel encryption technique, enables computations over encrypted data, presenting a paradigm shift in data privacy for organizations, governments, and consumers globally. Over four years, Zama has solidified its position as an FHE innovator, providing developers with tools to build privacy-preserving applications.
Zama’s most recent achievement, fhEVM, stands as the first confidential smart contract protocol for EVM blockchains, utilizing FHE to keep on-chain state and transaction data end-to-end encrypted. The company’s visionary CEO, Rand Hindi, envisions a world where data privacy is intrinsic and guaranteed by design. The investors, particularly Multicoin and Protocol Labs, bring valuable experience to support Zama as it introduces FHE to the blockchain sector, addressing core data privacy challenges.
