Zama started commercializing its product six months ago and has signed contracts worth over $50 million, primarily from the blockchain sector. The company's valuation is now estimated to be between $300-400 million. Despite the complexity and slow speed of homomorphic encryption, Zama sees potential in the technology, particularly for blockchain transactions. The company is also developing libraries and techniques to implement homomorphic encryption on existing infrastructure.
Key takeaways:
- A Paris-based startup, Zama, has raised $73 million in a Series A funding round co-led by Multicoin Capital and Protocol Labs, bringing its total funding to $81 million and its valuation to between $300-400 million.
- Zama is working on homomorphic encryption, a complex technique that secures data as it travels around networks, and has solutions for blockchain transactions and data exchange around artificial intelligence training and usage.
- The company has already signed contracts worth over $50 million, primarily with blockchain companies, and has 3,000 developers using its four libraries on GitHub.
- Zama's co-founders are Rand Hindi, a computer scientist with a PhD in bioinformatics and a background in AI and privacy, and Pascal Paillier, a cryptography expert with 25 patent families to his credit.