Zama Raises $57 Million in Series B Funding Round, Becomes FHE Unicorn

Zama, a company specializing in open-source cryptography and Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) solutions for blockchain, has successfully raised $57 million in its Series B funding round. This investment was co-led by U.S.-based firms Blockchange Ventures and Pantera Capital, bringing Zama’s total funding to over $150 million and its valuation to over a billion USD. The new funding will support Zama’s mainnet launch, ecosystem adoption, and research efforts to scale financial applications built with FHE to thousands of transactions per second.

The announcement comes at a time when there is growing demand within the finance ecosystem for technologies that enable confidential, scalable, and compliant onchain financial applications. Dr. Rand Hindi, CEO and co-founder of Zama, highlighted the significance of this milestone, stating that reaching a $1 billion valuation reflects the market’s confidence in Zama’s FHE technology and the team’s ability to deliver confidentiality to financial applications onchain.

Coinciding with the funding announcement, Zama unveiled its Confidential Blockchain Protocol and public testnet, set to launch in July 2025. This protocol will enable 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, compared the potential impact of Zama’s technology to that of Ethereum, noting that it could be foundational to global technology infrastructure, particularly as finance moves onchain and regulations tighten globally.

Paul Veradittakit, Managing Partner at Pantera, emphasized the significance of Zama’s FHE protocol launch, stating that it unlocks secure, compliant, and verifiable decentralized applications (dApps) for AI, crypto, and cloud. The protocol paves the way for onchain identity, financial, and consumer applications that were previously out of reach for developers.

Zama’s FHEVM allows for the execution of confidential smart contracts on encrypted data, ensuring both confidentiality and composability. This technology unlocks several use cases, including onchain finance, confidential tokens, identity and proof of humanity, and network states. Financial institutions can securely use public blockchains for applications such as confidential stablecoin issuance and payments, asset tokenization, and compliance. Confidential tokens enable blockchain companies to distribute tokens without disclosing ownership, reducing the risk of hacking. The ability to verify human users without disclosing their identity enhances the security of onchain finance. Additionally, Zama enables onchain communities and network states to operate confidentially, running key infrastructure on public blockchains.

With the new funding, Zama aims to advance the field of FHE and commercialize its accessibility to blockchain applications and beyond. The company is addressing core challenges that have historically hindered FHE adoption, including speed, hardware integration, and developer usability. Zama’s FHE technology is currently 100x faster than when the company was founded and is expected to be 100x more scalable within the next five years. The use of GPUs enables Zama to scale to hundreds of transactions per second, with plans for a dedicated hardware-accelerated chip to reach tens of thousands of transactions per second. Developers can use existing languages like Solidity to deploy applications on their preferred chain, making Zama’s technology more accessible.

Dr. Hindi emphasized that confidentiality is no longer a niche concern but a foundational requirement, driven by the broad adoption of blockchain in finance. This shift underscores the growing demand for secure, confidential computing technologies. Zama’s success in raising $57 million in its Series B funding round and becoming the world’s first FHE unicorn marks a significant milestone in the industry, reflecting the market’s confidence in the company’s technology and its potential to revolutionize the blockchain landscape.