Chain Reaction, a semiconductor company focused on disruptive blockchain and privacy hardware, announced that it raised $70 million in its Series C funding round “led by Morgan Creek Digital and participation from Hanaco Ventures, Jerusalem Venture Partners, KCK Capital, Exor, Atreides Management, and BlueRun Ventures.”
The investment round “brings total funding to $115 million and will be used to expand the engineering and development teams, which have grown to 100 full-time employees, including top talent from Nvidia, Mellanox, Israeli Intelligence, and TSMC.”
The round will “expedite deployment of enterprise-grade blockchain solutions – Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) and systems.”
It will also “scale Chain Reaction’s privacy tech solutions involving the design of cloud data center infrastructure to accelerate privacy enhancing technologies (PETs).”
Alon Webman, co-founder and CEO of Chain Reaction, said:
“Enabling real time compute on encrypted data is the holy grail of cloud computing. Chain Reaction is on the cusp of making this a reality by accelerating PETs. Our technology will enable enterprise and government to modernize compute infrastructure by moving private data to the cloud.”
The additional investment “ensures that Chain Reaction can continue focusing on crafting and delivering products for its two target markets.”
Driving high-performance hardware “for blockchain and privacy in data center and cloud, creating bleeding-edge solutions for markets that are still in their infancy.”
Mark Yusko, CEO and CIO of Morgan Creek Capital Management and Managing Partner of Morgan Creek Digital, said:
“We fully expect Chain Reaction’s blockchain products will become the new industry standard in blockchain compute infrastructure, laying the foundation for all future sustainable blockchain technologies. Blockchain is the key to securing democracy, decentralization, and freedom, but it is compute intensive. Chain Reaction’s products will shore up the value of predominant blockchain technologies and revolutionize use-cases for blockchain technologies in the not-so-distant future.”
Pasha Romanovski, Founding Partner at Hanaco Ventures, said of Chain Reaction’s Series C round:
“Hanaco has believed in Chain Reaction from the get-go. We saw the potential of combining experience and expertise in analog and system design with algorithms and cryptography to engineer the future of compute infrastructure. This is just the beginning from Chain Reaction, as they make great strides in disrupting the traditional and complex market of data center, cloud, and through to edge computing hardware infrastructure.”
Chain Reaction now “anticipates general availability of its first blockchain hardware chips and systems in the first quarter of 2023.”