French startup Zama, an open-source cryptography firm constructing Totally Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) options for blockchain, in the present day introduced a €49 million Sequence B funding spherical to help Zama’s mainnet launch and ecosystem adoption.
The spherical was co-led by two main U.S.-based funding corporations 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 area, which is a significant milestone for the business. Reaching a $1 billion valuation represents a big enhance that displays the market’s confidence in our FHE know-how and our crew’s potential to ship confidentiality to monetary purposes onchain,” mentioned Dr Rand Hindi, CEO and Co-founder of Zama. “The Sequence B spherical was structured to carry strategic blockchain traders 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 know-how allows a broad vary of use instances, from confidential finance to Web3 and community states.
Zama’s adoption is rising exponentially, with greater than 5,000 builders utilizing Zama’s varied 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 Totally 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,” mentioned Paul Veradittakit, Managing Companion at Pantera. “The protocol paves the best way for onchain id, monetary, and shopper purposes – beforehand out of attain for builders.”
The Zama Protocol allows builders to create confidential dApps, with none data of cryptography. Zama’s FH EVM makes it potential to run confidential good contracts on encrypted knowledge, guaranteeing each confidentiality and composability. Blockchain-native confidentiality unlocks a number of essential use instances, together with:
- Onchain Finance: Zama allows 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 power to maintain balances and quantities encrypted onchain allows blockchain corporations to distribute tokens confidentially. Traders, crew members and different token holders not need to publicly disclose their possession, permitting them to higher handle their portfolio and cut back the danger of being focused by hackers.
- Id and Proof of Humanity: The power to differentiate between people and AI in onchain purposes is important to the safety of onchain finance. With the Zama Protocol, utility builders can confirm whether or not a consumer is human, with out disclosing their id publicly.
- Community States: Zama allows 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 completely new generational know-how that might redefine how confidentiality is dealt with within the blockchain and, finally, in all of cloud computing,” mentioned 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 completely new know-how that could possibly be as foundational to our world know-how infrastructure.
“As finance strikes onchain and rules tighten globally, public blockchains are more likely to be the primary beneficiaries of what Zama is constructing. However the alternative goes nicely past that, as industries corresponding to well being care, protection, and nearly all others that use cloud computing might massively profit from the stepchange in confidentiality and compliance pioneered by FHE, and specifically, Zama.”
Zama will use the recent funding to advance the sector of Totally 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 know-how is reprotedly 100x quicker than when the corporate was based, and is now able to supporting most onchain fee use instances. Zama is anticipating its know-how to be 100x extra scalable inside the subsequent 5 years, permitting it to deal with probably the most demanding onchain purposes.
- {Hardware} integration: Utilizing GPUs allows Zama to scale to tons of of transactions per second. Zama is working in direction of a devoted hardware-accelerated chip to advance FHE efficiency, with the final word objective of reaching tens of 1000’s of transactions per second.
- Developer usability: Utilizing Zama doesn’t require studying new programming languages. As an alternative, builders can use Solidity and different present languages, and deploy their purposes on their most popular chain.
“We imagine that finally most blockchain transactions will should be confidential. Our mainnet is coming, and this testnet offers builders early entry to FHE to allow them to begin constructing and exploring this know-how for these purposes. We’ve labored exhausting to take away the historic limitations round efficiency and accessibility, and now we’re centered on getting this know-how 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.”
