Paris-based cryptography startup Zama secures €49 million to convey end-to-end encryption to public blockchains

French startup Zama, an open-source cryptography firm constructing Absolutely Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) options for blockchain, in the present day introduced a €49 million Sequence B funding spherical to help Zama’s mainnet launch and ecosystem adoption.

The spherical was co-led by two main U.S.-based funding corporations Blockchange Ventures and Pantera Capital , bringing Zama’s whole funding to over €129 million, and its valuation to north of a billion USD.

“With this newest increase, Zama turns into the world’s first unicorn within the FHE house, which is a significant milestone for the business. Reaching a $1 billion valuation represents a major enhance that displays the market’s confidence in our FHE know-how and our group’s means to ship confidentiality to monetary functions onchain,” stated Dr Rand Hindi, CEO and Co-founder of Zama. “The Sequence B spherical was structured to convey strategic blockchain buyers into Zama’s ecosystem, specializing in partnership worth slightly than capital forward of the launch of our mainnet and token.”

Based in 2024 by Dr Pascal Paillier and Dr Rand Hindi, Zama is an open-source cryptography firm constructing FHE options for blockchain. Its know-how allows a broad vary of use instances, from confidential finance to Web3 and community states.

Zama’s adoption is rising exponentially, with greater than 5,000 builders utilizing Zama’s varied FHE libraries.

The funding coincides with the launch of Zama’s Confidential Blockchain Protocol and its public testnet – enabling builders to start out constructing confidential functions – initially on Ethereum by Zama’s FHEVM, with help for different EVM chains and Solana to observe in 2026.

“Zama’s Absolutely Homomorphic Encryption protocol launch is a cryptography milestone. By enabling environment friendly, developer-friendly FHE, Zama unlocks safe, compliant, and verifiable dApps for AI, crypto, and cloud,” stated Paul Veradittakit, Managing Accomplice at Pantera. “The protocol paves the way in which for onchain identification, monetary, and client functions – beforehand out of attain for builders.”

The Zama Protocol allows builders to create confidential dApps, with none information of cryptography. Zama’s FH EVM makes it attainable to run confidential good contracts on encrypted information, guaranteeing each confidentiality and composability. Blockchain-native confidentiality unlocks a number of necessary use instances, together with:

• Onchain Finance: Zama allows monetary establishments to securely use public blockchains for a variety of functions, together with confidential stablecoin issuance and funds, asset tokenisation, compliance, and extra.
• Confidential Tokens: The power to maintain balances and quantities encrypted onchain allows blockchain corporations to distribute tokens confidentially. Traders, group members and different token holders not must publicly disclose their possession, permitting them to higher handle their portfolio and cut back the danger of being focused by hackers.
• Identification and Proof of Humanity: The power to differentiate between people and AI in onchain functions is important to the safety of onchain finance. With the Zama Protocol, software builders can confirm whether or not a person is human, with out disclosing their identification publicly.
• Community States: Zama allows onchain communities and community states to function confidentially. From forex to identification, governance and registries, it now turns into possible to run key infrastructure on public blockchains.

“Zama is commercializing a wholly new generational know-how that might redefine how confidentiality is dealt with within the blockchain and, in the end, in all of cloud computing,” stated Ken Seiff, Co-Managing Accomplice of Blockchange Ventures. “That is our third and largest funding in Zama. Not since I first noticed Ethereum in 2014, have I seen an organization commercialising a wholly new know-how that could possibly be as foundational to our world know-how infrastructure.

“As finance strikes onchain and rules tighten globally, public blockchains are prone to be the primary beneficiaries of what Zama is constructing. However the alternative goes nicely past that, as industries similar to well being care, protection, and just about all others that use cloud computing might massively profit from the stepchange in confidentiality and compliance pioneered by FHE, and specifically, Zama.”​

Zama will use the contemporary funding to advance the sector of Absolutely Homomorphic Encryption and additional commercialise its accessibility to blockchain functions and past.

To that finish, Zama is actively addressing the core challenges which have traditionally held again FHE adoption, together with:

• Pace: At present benchmarks, Zama’s FHE know-how is reprotedly 100x quicker than when the corporate was based, and is now able to supporting most onchain cost use instances. Zama is anticipating its know-how to be 100x extra scalable inside the subsequent 5 years, permitting it to deal with probably the most demanding onchain functions.
• {Hardware} integration: Utilizing GPUs allows Zama to scale to a whole bunch of transactions per second. Zama is working in direction of a devoted hardware-accelerated chip to advance FHE efficiency, with the last word aim of reaching tens of hundreds of transactions per second.
• Developer usability: Utilizing Zama doesn’t require studying new programming languages. As a substitute, builders can use Solidity and different present languages, and deploy their functions on their most popular chain.

“We consider that in the end most blockchain transactions will have to be confidential. Our mainnet is coming, and this testnet offers builders early entry to FHE to allow them to begin constructing and exploring this know-how for these functions. We’ve labored arduous to take away the historic obstacles round efficiency and accessibility, and now we’re targeted on getting this know-how into the fingers of builders and real-world merchandise,” added Hindi. “This spherical additionally underscores a broader shift: confidentiality is not a distinct segment concern – it’s a foundational requirement. The broad adoption of blockchain in finance is driving demand for safe, confidential computing applied sciences.”