Metaplanet’s Post

We just announced Zama’s $73m Series A, one of the largest ever for a french company. Why did we raise so much, and what will we do with it? FHE is the holy grail of cryptography. It allows computing on encrypted data, without having to ever see it. This removed all issues of confidentiality, data leaks, surveillance, while also enabling novel use cases. But when we started Zama 4 years ago with Pascal Paillier, FHE didn’t work. It was too slow, too limited in terms of use cases, and too difficult to use. Thanks to our incredible team, these problems are mostly solved today: you can use our technology for anything you want, from blockchain to AI, without knowing anything about cryptography! Performance wise, we are on track to reach 100x speedup vs when we started. While this is still too slow for LLMs, it is good enough for most blockchain applications, as well as simple AI ones. The reason FHE is so great for blockchain is that it enables composability on encrypted states. FHE smart contracts compute on encrypted data instead of public data, but otherwise are exactly the same as regular contracts, written in plain Solidity. There are infinite use cases: from confidential RWA tokenization, to onchain DeFi compliance, games or DAO governance. Every day we talk to a new company, we discover a new use case. And we have had hundreds of such conversations. Incredible teams are using our technology today, such as Fhenix who is building an FHE optimistic rollup, Inco who is building a modular confidentiality-as-a-service blockchain, and Shiba Inu who is building an entire universe of confidential apps. We are also closely working with several large financial institutions on confidential permissioned blockchain networks, allowing them to interact with each other without revealing everything they do onchain. This funding allows us to do 3 things: 1. Continue doing research to improve FHE, 2. Support our partners who are in production, and 3. Have multiple years of runway so we don’t have to worry about market downturns. And importantly, it allows us to continue executing on our FHE masterplan: - first, make FHE available to every developer - second, make FHE fast enough to do 1000 tps in blockchain and run LLMs encrypted end-to-end - third, extend it to all web services - finally, make the internet encrypted end-to-end via an HTTPZ protocol Finally I would like to thank our incredible investors who have been trusting us all along. They are awesome, so if you are raising, you should go talk to them! MULTICOIN CAPITAL, Protocol Labs, Blockchange Ventures, Portal, Stake Capital Group, Vsquared Ventures, Lunar Ventures, Metaplanet, Robot VC, and our many awesome angels. Read more in the link in the comments