Zama Raises $73M in Series A Funding to Develop Fully Homomorphic Encryption Applications

According to CoinDesk, open-source cryptography firm Zama has raised $73 million in a Series A funding round to develop applications based on fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). FHE is a technology that enables data to be processed without decrypting it, potentially useful for protecting privacy in blockchain and AI. The funding round was led by Multicoin Capital and Protocol Labs, with participating investors including Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, Filecoin founder Juan Benet, and Ethereum and Polkadot co-founder Gavin Wood. Founded in 2020, Zama describes FHE as the 'holy grail' of cryptography, allowing companies to offer services to users without the need to see their data and expose it to greater risk. Zama's most recent product, fhEVM, is a confidential smart contract protocol for Ethereum-compatible blockchains, allowing on-chain data to remain end-to-end encrypted during processing. Kyle Samani, managing partner of Multicoin, said in a press release that FHE was 'the most important foundational cryptographic primitive for the next decade of computing.'