French cryptography startup Zama is moving forward with ambitious plans to enable computation on encrypted data without decryption by securing $73 million in a Series A funding round.
Led by major industry investors Multicoin Capital and Protocol Labs, the raise aims to promote the use of Zama’s Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) technology, CEO Rand Hindi announced on March 7.
Described by Hindi as the “holy grail of cryptography,” Zama’s FHE aims to make data privacy a standard feature on the internet while still enabling information processing in operations like cloud computing.
“Imagine you have a secret message that you want to keep hidden, but you also need someone else to do some math with it without ever seeing the actual message,” Zama’s chief technology officer Pascal Paillier told Cointelegraph.
FHE is like a “magical box” where you can put your secret message, Paillier noted, adding that users are able to lock the box once the message is inside. He stated:
“The magic part is that someone else can still do the math on the locked box, without ever opening it or seeing your secret. When they're done, you can unlock the box and see the result of the math, with your message still safe and secret inside.”
According to Paillier, Zama has already onboarded several significant clients since its foundation in 2020, including Shiba Inu, which is using Zama’s tech to “construct an entire network state.” SHIB adopted a new FHE-enabled privacy infrastructure in late February 2024, aiming to improve on-chain privacy.
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“By making FHE more accessible and efficient for developers to use, Zama wants to eventually empower businesses to leverage cloud computing and other technologies without compromising on privacy,” Paillier said. This approach involves creating user-friendly tools, libraries, or platforms that integrate FHE into everyday digital services, making it easier for firms to adopt this advanced encryption without needing specialized knowledge, he added.
Zama CTO also emphasized that the company’s solution has made a breakthrough in terms of a tradeoff between on-chain transparency and off-chain privacy.
Developers can deploy the “best of both worlds,” or execute confidential smart contracts on encrypted data without sacrificing either confidentiality or composability, Paillier noted.
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