- Zama, a French cryptography startup, secures $73 million in Series A funding, driving its mission to enable computation on encrypted data without decryption.
- Industry investors Multicoin Capital and Protocol Labs lead the funding round, aiming to promote adoption of Zama’s Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) technology.
- Zama’s FHE technology, as explained by Chief Technology Officer Pascal Paillier, functions like a “magical box,” allowing computation on encrypted data without revealing the underlying information.
Zama, a cryptography startup based in France, is advancing its agenda to facilitate computation on encrypted data without decryption, having secured $73 million in a Series A funding round.
Zama CEO unveils vision
Led by industry investors Multicoin Capital and Protocol Labs, the funding round seeks to advocate for the adoption of Zama’s Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) technology, as Zama CEO Rand Hindi disclosed on March 7.
According to CEO Rand Hindi, Zama’s Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) technology aims to establish data privacy as a fundamental aspect of the internet, while simultaneously facilitating information processing in tasks such as cloud computing.
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Unlocking the secrets of FHE tech
In an interview between Zama’s chief technology officer Pascal Paillier and Cointelegraph, “Imagine you have a secret message that you want to keep hidden, but you also need someone else to do some math with it without ever seeing the actual message.”
Based on Paillier, FHE is similar to a “magical box” that you may use to store a secret message. Once the message is inside, users can lock the box.
Paillier said: “The magic part is that someone else can still do the math on the locked box, without ever opening it or seeing your secret. When they’re done, you can unlock the box and see the result of the math, with your message still safe and secret inside.”
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Since its founding in 2020, Zama has added a number of notable clients, such as Shiba Inu, an ethereum-based decentralised cryptocurrency, which is utilising the company’s technology to “build an entire network state.”
In late February 2024, Shiba Inu implemented a new FHE-enabled privacy architecture with the goal of enhancing on-chain privacy.
