Zama Raises $57 Million, Becomes World's First FHE Unicorn

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 Blockchange Ventures and Pantera Capital, both based in the United States. With this funding, Zama's total investment reaches over $150 million, and its valuation exceeds $1 billion, making it the world's first Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) unicorn. The funds will be used to support the mainnet launch, ecosystem adoption, and research efforts to scale financial applications built with FHE to thousands of transactions per second.

The announcement coincides with the launch of the Zama Protocol, which enables confidential applications on any blockchain. Starting from July 2025, developers will be able to build FHE applications on Zama’s public testnet. The protocol supports other EVM chains and Solana, with plans to expand further. This development 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 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. Ken Seiff, Co-Managing Partner of Blockchange Ventures, compared Zama's technology to the foundational impact of Ethereum, suggesting that it could revolutionize global technology infrastructure, particularly in finance, healthcare, defense, and cloud computing.

Paul Veradittakit, Managing Partner at Pantera, emphasized that Zama's FHE protocol launch is a significant milestone in cryptography. It enables efficient, developer-friendly FHE, unlocking secure, compliant, and verifiable decentralized applications (dApps) for AI, crypto, and cloud. The protocol paves the way for onchain identity, financial, and consumer applications, which 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 various 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.

Zama will use the new funding to advance the field of FHE and further 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 to develop 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. Rand Hindi emphasized that confidentiality is no longer a niche concern but a foundational requirement, driven by the broad adoption of blockchain in finance. This demand for secure, confidential computing technologies is a broader shift in the industry. 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/.