Zama becomes 1st fully homomorphic encryption unicorn with $57M raise

French open source cryptography company Zama today announced a $57 million Series B funding round co-led by Blockchange Ventures and Pantera Capital, bringing Zama’s total funding to over $150 million, and its valuation to north of a billion USD. 

Founded by Dr Pascal Paillier and Dr Rand Hindi, the company is building state-of-the-art Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) solutions for blockchain. Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) allows computations to be performed on encrypted data without needing to decrypt it first. This means that sensitive information can remain secure while still being processed, making it useful for applications like cloud computing and data analysis without exposing the underlying data.

Its technology enables a broad range of use cases, from confidential finance to Web3 and network states.

Dr Rand Hindi, CEO and co-founder of Zama, shared:

“With this latest raise, Zama becomes the world’s first unicorn in the FHE space, which is a major milestone for the industry.

Reaching a $1 billion valuation represents a significant increase that reflects the market's confidence in our FHE technology and our team's ability to deliver confidentiality to financial applications onchain."

According to Hindi, the Series B round was structured to bring strategic blockchain investors into Zama's ecosystem, focusing on partnership value rather than capital ahead of the launch of its mainnet and token.

The timing of Zama's announcement reflects the accelerating demand within the finance ecosystem for technologies that enable confidential, scalable, and compliant onchain financial applications. 

The Zama Protocol enables developers to create confidential dapps, without any knowledge of cryptography. Zama’s FHEVM enables the execution of confidential smart contracts on encrypted data, ensuring both confidentiality and composability. Blockchain-native confidentiality unlocks several important use cases, including:

• Onchain Finance: Zama enables financial institutions to securely use public blockchains for a range of applications, including confidential stablecoin issuance and payments, asset tokenisation, compliance, and more. 
• Confidential Tokens: Investors, team members and other token holders no longer have to publicly disclose their ownership, allowing them to better manage their portfolio and reduce the risk of being targeted by hackers.
• Identity and Proof of Humanity: With the Zama Protocol, application developers can verify whether a user is human, without disclosing their identity publicly.
• Network States: Zama enables onchain communities and network states to operate confidentially. From currency to identity, governance and registries, it now becomes feasible to run key infrastructure on public blockchains.

The funding coincides with the launch of Zama’s Confidential Blockchain Protocol and its public testnet — enabling developers to start building confidential applications— initially on Ethereum through Zama’s FHEVM, with support for other EVM chains and Solana to follow in 2026. 

“Zama is commercialising an entirely new generational technology that could redefine how confidentiality is handled in the blockchain and, ultimately, in all of cloud computing,” said Ken Seiff, Co-Managing Partner of Blockchange Ventures. 

“This is our third and largest investment in Zama. Not since I first saw Ethereum in 2014, have I seen a company commercialising an entirely new technology that could be as foundational to our global technology infrastructure." 

Seiff contends that as finance moves onchain and regulations tighten globally, public blockchains are likely to be the first beneficiaries of what Zama is building. 

“But the opportunity goes well beyond that, as industries such as health care, defence, and virtually all others that use cloud computing could massively benefit from the stepchange in confidentiality and compliance pioneered by FHE, and in particular, Zama.”

Paul Veradittakit, Managing Partner at Pantera, calls the Zama FHE protocol launch a cryptography milestone. 

“By enabling efficient, developer-friendly FHE, Zama unlocks secure, compliant, and verifiable dApps for AI, crypto, and cloud.

The protocol paves the way for onchain identity, financial, and consumer applications—previously out of reach for developers."

Zama is addressing the primary barriers to the widespread adoption of fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) by focusing on speed, scalability, hardware integration, and developer usability. Its technology is now 100 times faster than at launch, already supporting most onchain payment use cases, and is projected to be 100 times more scalable within five years. 

By leveraging GPUs, Zama can currently handle hundreds of transactions per second and is developing a dedicated hardware chip to increase that number to tens of thousands.

Further, devs don’t need to learn new languages — Zama supports existing ones like Solidity and works across preferred blockchain environments.

“We believe that ultimately most blockchain transactions will need to be confidential. Our mainnet is coming, and this test gives developers early access to FHE so they can start building and exploring this technology for these applications. We’ve worked hard to remove the historical barriers around performance and accessibility, and now we’re focused on getting this technology into the hands of builders and real-world products,” said Hindi. 

Zama’s adoption is growing exponentially, with more than 5,000 developers using Zama’s various FHE libraries. 

The new funding will support Zama’s mainnet launch, ecosystem adoption, and research efforts to make financial applications built with FHE scale to thousands of transactions per second.

Lead image: Dr Rand Hindi, CEO and co-founder of Zama. Photo: uncredited.