Zama Secures $57 Million in Series B Funding for Blockchain Encryption

Zama, an open-source cryptography company, has successfully secured $57 million in its Series B funding round. This significant investment is aimed at bringing end-to-end encryption to public blockchains, a groundbreaking development in the field of cryptography and blockchain technology. The funding round was backed by prominent U.S. blockchain investors, including Blockchange Ventures and Pantera Capital, solidifying Zama's position as the world’s first Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) company.

With this latest funding, Zama's total funding now exceeds $150 million, and its valuation has surpassed a billion dollars. The new capital will be directed towards several key initiatives, including the upcoming mainnet launch, ecosystem adoption, and research efforts to enhance the scalability of fintech applications built with FHE. The goal is to enable these applications to handle thousands of transactions per second, addressing the growing demand for confidential, scalable, and compliant on-chain financial applications.

Dr. Rand Hindi, CEO and co-founder of Zama, emphasized the timeliness of this announcement, highlighting the increasing need for secure and confidential financial applications within the finance ecosystem. The achievement of a $1 billion valuation marks a significant milestone for the industry, reflecting the market's confidence in Zama's FHE technology and the company's ability to deliver confidentiality to financial applications on-chain.

In addition to its funding round, Zama is set to launch the public test net for its Confidential Blockchain Protocol in July 2025. This protocol will enable developers to build confidential applications using Zama’s FHEVM, with support for other EVM chains and Solana to follow. The FHEVM allows for the execution of confidential smart contracts on encrypted data, ensuring both confidentiality and composability. This breakthrough unlocks several use cases, including on-chain finance, confidential tokens, identity and proof of humanity, and network states.

Zama’s FHE technology has seen significant advancements since its inception, with current speeds being 100 times faster than when the company was founded. This improvement supports most on-chain payment use cases, and the project aims to achieve 100 times more scalability within the next five years. Hardware integration, particularly with GPUs, enables Zama to handle hundreds of transactions per second, with plans to reach tens of thousands of transactions per second using a dedicated hardware-accelerated chip.

Developer usability is another key focus for Zama. The company’s technology is designed to be user-friendly, allowing developers to deploy their applications on their preferred chains using familiar programming languages like Solidity, without the need to learn new languages. This ease of use is expected to accelerate the adoption of FHE in blockchain applications, addressing historical barriers to its implementation.

With the new funding, Zama is poised to advance the field of FHE and further commercialize its accessibility to blockchain applications. The company is committed to addressing key issues that have historically hindered FHE adoption, ensuring that its technology can meet the demands of the rapidly evolving blockchain landscape. This development is a significant step forward in the quest for secure, confidential, and scalable financial applications on public blockchains.