Zama, an open-source cryptography company, has secured $73 million in Series A funding to create apps utilising fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), a technology that permits data processing without requiring decryption and may be helpful for safeguarding privacy in blockchain and artificial intelligence.
By email on Thursday, Zama revealed that Protocol Labs and Multicoin Capital had lead the investment round. According to a news release, investors that took part included Gavin Wood, the co-creator of Polkadot and Ethereum, Juan Benet, the founder of Filecoin, and Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko.
According to Zama, which was founded in 2020, FHE is the “holy grail” of encryption since it enables businesses to provide services to customers without having to view their data and put it at higher risk. The most recent offering from Zama is fhEVM, a private smart contract protocol for blockchains that work with Ethereum that keeps on-chain data end-to-end encrypted while it’s being processed.
According to the press release, Multicoin managing partner Kyle Samani described FHE as “the most important foundational cryptographic primitive for the next decade of computing.”