Zama Raises $57M to Revolutionize Blockchain Privacy with Fully Homomorphic Encryption

Zama raises $57M to build full encryption for public blockchains - SiliconANGLE

Zama raises $57M to build full encryption for public blockchains Zama SAS, an open-source cryptography startup focused on building fully homomorphic encryption or FHE to protect privacy in blockchain and artificial intelligence applications, said today it raised $57 million in early-stage funding. The Series B funding round was co-led by Blockchange Ventures and Pantera Capital, bringing Zama's total funding to over $150 million and increasing the company's valuation to over $1 billion. This round comes a little over a year after the company raised $73 million in 2024. Alongside the funding, Zama is launching the public testnet for its Confidential Blockchain Protocol, which will allow developers to start building applications that can communicate privately through the company's specialized virtual machine starting on the Ethereum blockchain. Zama began as a pioneer in the field of FHE, a novel encryption technique that enables computation on encrypted data. The technology allows organizations to protect consumer data without compromising the utility. Traditionally, encryption is used to safeguard data that is stored or while it is being transmitted between endpoints. However, applying encryption when data is actively being processed by a central processing unit or a graphics processing unit can be challenging. Fully homomorphic encryption addresses this problem. Blockchain technology makes it possible to publicly verify that requests are executed according to predetermined logic and that a transaction occurred by recording it to a public ledger that is protected by cryptographic certainty. However, this requires disclosing the transactions and data to everyone. Keeping the information private would make verifying the information impossible. "Without confidentiality, blockchain cannot reach mass adoption," said Rand Hindi, chief executive and co-founder of Zama. Hindi said the web started with hypertext protocol with zero encryption, or HTTP, and moved on to encrypting data in transit with HTTPS, the next natural step is to enable full encryption by default for every application from start to end will be something the company calls HTTPZ. "Until recently, however, FHE was too slow, too limited in terms of applications it could support, and too difficult to use for developers. This is what our team at Zama has spent the last 5 years solving," Hindi explained. Using the company's CBP, developers can use FHE on the Ethereum blockchain, using common programming languages such as Solidity and Python, while being over 100x faster than 5 years ago. It is also already post-quantum, meaning there are no known quantum computing algorithms capable of breaking it. Example use cases for the protocol include use for finance with credit card payments, remittances or banking, the tokenization of financial assets, the exchange of bonds and stocks on the blockchain, fully encrypted swaps of tokens and more. Many of these cases have required the use of private blockchains in order to preserve privacy and confidentiality. Other examples include on-chain identity and governance or the creation of data marketplaces for AI. With FHE, users can selectively share and sell data with companies wishing to use their data to train AI models. AI models can also be trained encrypted, with the result being decrypted, ensuring that users have a source of revenue for their data, rather than selling it only once and having it used forever. Zama said it expects its technology to be 100x more scalable within the next five years. Using GPUs allows Zama's protocol to scale to hundreds of transactions per second and the company is working on a dedicated hardware chip to advance FHE performance, with the ultimate goal of reaching tens of thousands of transactions per second.

Zama raises $57M in series B to bring end-to-end encryption to public blockchains

Paris, Zug, France/Switzerland, June 25th, 2025, Chainwire - Zama, the open-source cryptography company building state-of-the-art Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) solutions for blockchain, announced a $57 million Series B funding round co-led by U.S.-based investment firms Blockchange Ventures and Pantera Capital, bringing Zama's total funding to over $150 million, and its valuation to north of a billion USD. The new funding will support Zama's mainnet launch, ecosystem adoption, and research efforts to make financial applications built with FHE scale to thousands of transactions per second. The timing of Zama's announcement reflects the accelerating demand within the finance ecosystem for technologies that enable confidential, scalable, and compliant onchain financial applications. "With this latest raise, Zama becomes the world's first unicorn in the FHE space, which is a major milestone for the industry. Reaching a $1 billion valuation represents a significant increase that reflects the market's confidence in our FHE technology and our team's ability to deliver confidentiality to financial applications onchain." said Dr Rand Hindi, CEO and co-founder of Zama. The funding coincides with the announcement of Zama's Confidential Blockchain Protocol and its public testnet in July 2025, enabling developers to build confidential applications through Zama's FHEVM, with support for other EVM chains and Solana to follow. Ken Seiff, Co-Managing Partner of Blockchange Ventures, said: "Not since I first saw Ethereum in 2014, have I seen a company commercializing an entirely new technology that could be as foundational to our global technology infrastructure. As finance moves onchain and regulations tighten globally, public blockchains are likely to be the first beneficiaries of what Zama is building. But the opportunity goes well beyond that, as industries such as health care, defense, and virtually all others that use cloud computing could massively benefit from the stepchange in confidentiality and compliance pioneered by FHE, and in particular, Zama." "Zama's FHE protocol launch is a cryptography milestone. By enabling efficient, developer-friendly FHE, Zama unlocks secure, compliant, and verifiable dApps for AI, crypto, and cloud," said Paul Veradittakit, Managing Partner at Pantera. "The protocol paves the way for onchain identity, financial, and consumer applications -- previously out of reach for developers." Zama's FHEVM makes it possible to run confidential smart contracts on encrypted data, guaranteeing both confidentiality and composability. Blockchain-native confidentiality unlocks several use cases: Zama will use the fresh funding to advance the field of FHE and further commercialize its accessibility to blockchain applications and beyond. Zama is actively addressing the core challenges that have historically held back FHE adoption: "This round also underscores a broader shift: confidentiality is no longer a niche concern -- it's a foundational requirement. The broad adoption of blockchain in finance is driving demand for secure, confidential computing technologies," said Hindi. Zama is an open-source cryptography company building state-of-the-art FHE solutions for blockchain. Its technology enables a broad range of use cases, from confidential finance to Web3 and network states. Zama was founded by Dr. Pascal Paillier and Dr. Rand Hindi, and has the largest research team in homomorphic encryption.

Zama Raises $57 Million for End-to-End Encryption Solution for Blockchains | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. The company will use the new funding to support its mainnet launch, ecosystem adoption and research efforts to make financial transactions built with Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) scale to thousands of transactions per second, according to a Wednesday (June 25) press release emailed to PYMNTS. FHE enables data processing without decryption, so encryption is maintained during both transit and processing, according to an article on Zama's website. That means "all online activities can now be truly end-to-end encrypted," the article said. The company's Series B round brings Zama's total funding to $150 million and its valuation to $1 billion, according to the Wednesday release. "The Series B round was structured to bring strategic blockchain investors into Zama's ecosystem, focusing on partnership value rather than capital ahead of the launch of our mainnet and token," Zama CEO and Co-founder Rand Hindi said in the release. The round was led by Blockchange Ventures and Pantera Capital, per the release. Blockchange Ventures Co-Managing Partner Ken Seiff said in the release that Zama's FHE solutions are likely to benefit public blockchains first but could benefit any industry that uses cloud computing and requires greater confidentiality and compliance. "Zama is commercializing an entirely new generational technology that could redefine how confidentiality is handled in the blockchain and, ultimately, in all of cloud computing," Seiff said. Pantera Capita Managing Partner Paul Veradittakit said in the release that Zama's FHE protocol is efficient and developer-friendly and supports decentralized applications (dApps) for artificial intelligence, crypto and cloud. "The protocol paves the way for on-chain identity, financial and consumer applications -- previously out of reach for developers," Veradittakit said. Zama's Series B came about 15 months after a March 2024 Series A funding round in which the company raised $73 million to grow its FHE solution. Hindi said at the time that Zama was formed four years earlier and dedicated to FHE, which he said is the "holy grail of cryptography."