French startup Zama has successfully raised $73 million in Series A funding, one of the largest venture rounds in France's history.
As CEO Rand Hindi announced on March 7, this funding will bolster the development and application of Zama's pioneering Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) technology.
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The funding round, co-led by industry giants Multicoin Capital and Protocol Labs, is poised to escalate the deployment of Zama's FHE technology, which CEO Rand Hindi calls the "holy grail of cryptography."
This innovative approach allows for the processing of encrypted data without the need to decrypt it first, promising a new era of data privacy on the internet.
Zama's chief technology officer, Pascal Paillier, likened FHE to a "magical box" where a secret message can be securely stored while still permitting external computations:
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.
Zama has identified the blockchain sector as a critical area of focus due to the public visibility of blockchain transactions, which poses a privacy challenge for apps handling sensitive data.
To overcome this, Zama developed the fhEVM, a tool allowing for the creation of private blockchain applications with encrypted transactions and smart contract processing, compatible with any Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible blockchain.
Since Zama's establishment in 2020, the technology has already seen adoption from significant players, such as Fhenix and Shiba Inu (SHIB).
The startup's efforts to balance on-chain transparency with off-chain privacy could revolutionize the handling of confidential smart contracts and encrypted data, offering a glimpse into a future where privacy and functionality coexist seamlessly.
Another successful funding round was completed by Avail, which raised $27 million to fortify the infrastructure necessary for a more integrated Web3 experience.
