French startup Zama, an open-source cryptography firm constructing Absolutely Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) options for blockchain, in the present day introduced a €49 million Collection B funding spherical to help Zama’s mainnet launch and ecosystem adoption.
The spherical was co-led by two main U.S.-based funding companies Blockchange Ventures and Pantera Capital , bringing Zama’s complete funding to over €129 million, and its valuation to north of a billion USD.
“With this newest increase, Zama turns into the world’s first unicorn within the FHE house, which is a significant milestone for the trade. Reaching a $1 billion valuation represents a big enhance that displays the market’s confidence in our FHE expertise and our staff’s means to ship confidentiality to monetary purposes onchain,” stated Dr Rand Hindi, CEO and Co-founder of Zama. “The Collection B spherical was structured to convey strategic blockchain buyers into Zama’s ecosystem, specializing in partnership worth somewhat than capital forward of the launch of our mainnet and token.”
Based in 2024 by Dr Pascal Paillier and Dr Rand Hindi, Zama is an open-source cryptography firm constructing FHE options for blockchain. Its expertise permits a broad vary of use circumstances, from confidential finance to Web3 and community states.
Zama’s adoption is rising exponentially, with greater than 5,000 builders utilizing Zama’s numerous FHE libraries.
The funding coincides with the launch of Zama’s Confidential Blockchain Protocol and its public testnet – enabling builders to start out constructing confidential purposes – initially on Ethereum by Zama’s FHEVM, with help for different EVM chains and Solana to observe in 2026.
“Zama’s Absolutely Homomorphic Encryption protocol launch is a cryptography milestone. By enabling environment friendly, developer-friendly FHE, Zama unlocks safe, compliant, and verifiable dApps for AI, crypto, and cloud,” stated Paul Veradittakit, Managing Companion at Pantera. “The protocol paves the way in which for onchain id, monetary, and shopper purposes – beforehand out of attain for builders.”
The Zama Protocol permits builders to create confidential dApps, with none information of cryptography. Zama’s FH EVM makes it attainable to run confidential sensible contracts on encrypted information, guaranteeing each confidentiality and composability. Blockchain-native confidentiality unlocks a number of essential use circumstances, together with:
Onchain Finance: Zama permits monetary establishments to securely use public blockchains for a spread of purposes, together with confidential stablecoin issuance and funds, asset tokenisation, compliance, and extra.
Confidential Tokens: The flexibility to maintain balances and quantities encrypted onchain permits blockchain corporations to distribute tokens confidentially. Buyers, staff members and different token holders not must publicly disclose their possession, permitting them to higher handle their portfolio and scale back the danger of being focused by hackers.
Identification and Proof of Humanity: The flexibility to tell apart between people and AI in onchain purposes is important to the safety of onchain finance. With the Zama Protocol, software builders can confirm whether or not a consumer is human, with out disclosing their id publicly.
Community States: Zama permits onchain communities and community states to function confidentially. From forex to id, governance and registries, it now turns into possible to run key infrastructure on public blockchains.
“Zama is commercializing a wholly new generational expertise that would redefine how confidentiality is dealt with within the blockchain and, in the end, in all of cloud computing,” stated Ken Seiff, Co-Managing Companion of Blockchange Ventures. “That is our third and largest funding in Zama. Not since I first noticed Ethereum in 2014, have I seen an organization commercialising a wholly new expertise that may very well be as foundational to our international expertise infrastructure.
“As finance strikes onchain and rules tighten globally, public blockchains are prone to be the primary beneficiaries of what Zama is constructing. However the alternative goes effectively past that, as industries resembling well being care, protection, and just about all others that use cloud computing may massively profit from the stepchange in confidentiality and compliance pioneered by FHE, and particularly, Zama.”
Zama will use the contemporary funding to advance the sector of Absolutely Homomorphic Encryption and additional commercialise its accessibility to blockchain purposes and past.
To that finish, Zama is actively addressing the core challenges which have traditionally held again FHE adoption, together with:
Velocity: At present benchmarks, Zama’s FHE expertise is reprotedly 100x quicker than when the corporate was based, and is now able to supporting most onchain fee use circumstances. Zama is anticipating its expertise to be 100x extra scalable inside the subsequent 5 years, permitting it to handle probably the most demanding onchain purposes.
{Hardware} integration: Utilizing GPUs permits Zama to scale to a whole bunch of transactions per second. Zama is working in the direction of a devoted hardware-accelerated chip to advance FHE efficiency, with the final word purpose of reaching tens of hundreds of transactions per second.
Developer usability: Utilizing Zama doesn’t require studying new programming languages. As a substitute, builders can use Solidity and different present languages, and deploy their purposes on their most well-liked chain.
“We imagine that in the end most blockchain transactions will should be confidential. Our mainnet is coming, and this testnet provides builders early entry to FHE to allow them to begin constructing and exploring this expertise for these purposes. We’ve labored laborious to take away the historic limitations round efficiency and accessibility, and now we’re centered on getting this expertise into the arms of builders and real-world merchandise,” added Hindi. “This spherical additionally underscores a broader shift: confidentiality is not a distinct segment concern – it’s a foundational requirement. The broad adoption of blockchain in finance is driving demand for safe, confidential computing applied sciences.”
