Zama Raises $57 Million in Series B Funding Round Valuation Exceeds $1 Billion

Zama, a company specializing in open-source cryptography, 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 funding will support Zama’s mainnet launch, ecosystem adoption, and research efforts to scale financial applications built with Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) to thousands of transactions per second.

The announcement coincides with the launch of Zama’s Confidential Blockchain Protocol and its public testnet in July 2025. This protocol enables developers to build confidential applications through Zama’s FHEVM, with support for other EVM chains and Solana to follow. The new funding reflects the 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 funding round, stating that Zama has become the world’s first unicorn in the FHE space. This milestone reflects the market’s confidence in Zama’s FHE technology and the team’s ability to deliver confidentiality to financial applications onchain. Ken Seiff, Co-Managing Partner of Blockchange Ventures, compared Zama’s technology to the foundational impact of Ethereum, noting its potential to revolutionize various industries beyond finance, including healthcare and defense.

Paul Veradittakit, Managing Partner at Pantera, emphasized that Zama’s FHE protocol launch is a significant milestone in cryptography. By enabling efficient, developer-friendly FHE, Zama unlocks secure, compliant, and verifiable decentralized applications (dApps) for AI, crypto, and cloud computing. 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. Blockchain companies can distribute tokens confidentially, reducing the risk of hacking. The ability to verify a user’s identity without disclosing it publicly enhances the security of onchain finance. Additionally, onchain communities and network states can operate confidentially, running key infrastructure on public blockchains.

Zama is actively addressing the core challenges that have historically hindered FHE adoption. The company’s technology is now 100x faster than when it was founded and is capable of supporting most onchain payment use cases. Zama aims to make its technology 100x more scalable within the next five years, allowing it to address the most demanding onchain applications. By using GPUs, Zama can scale to hundreds of transactions per second and is working towards a dedicated hardware-accelerated chip to reach tens of thousands of transactions per second. Developers can use existing languages like Solidity to deploy their 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. The broad adoption of blockchain in finance is driving demand for secure, confidential computing technologies. Zama was founded by Dr. Pascal Paillier and Dr. Rand Hindi and has the largest research team in homomorphic encryption. The company’s technology enables a broad range of use cases, from confidential finance to Web3 and network states. For more information about Zama, users can visit their website at https://www.zama.ai/.