Crypto-focused firm Zama has reportedly secured $73 million in funding via a Series A round that included contributions from Multicoin Capital and other investors.
Zama, which is described as an open-source cryptography platform that assists developers with creating privacy-preserving apps, confirmed its latest Series A investment round.
Multicoin Capital and Protocol Labs, the firm focused on “decentralized” file storage network Filecoin, have reportedly co-led the funding round.
Other industry participants that took part in the round include Metaplanet, Blockchange Ventures, Vsquared Ventures as well as Stake Capital.
Angel investors such as Filecoin founder Juan Benet, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko and Ethereum / Polkadot co-creator Gavin Wood have also participated in the round.
Zama says it acquired this capital via two separate installments during the last couple years. This, according to CEO Rand Hindi. As reported widely, this is an equity funding round and has resulted in Zama’s overall funding reaching more than $80 million.
As noted in the update, Benet from Filecoin and Kyle Samani from Multicoin joined Zama’s board of directors (as part of this latest transaction).
As explained by its developers, Zama is a cryptography firm that has been established by Hindi and Pascal Paillier.
Paillier, an experienced cryptographer, is notably credited with being one of the inventors of fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) tech, which is at the core of Zama’s product offerings.
FHE supports end-to-end data encryption.
The firm also shared that it has created a confidential smart contract protocol known as fhEVM that enables devs to implement privacy-preserving apps. fhEVM works for Ethereum virtual machine (EVM) chains. Blockchain developer Inco and L2 dev Fhenix, along with the Shiba Inu memecoin creators are using Zama’s FHE tech.
Zama says it intends to further enhance its FHE tools.
Privacy-enhancing protocols have become increasingly common in the crypto space, because certain organizations and service providers prefer to transact in a confidential manner. There could be highly sensitive financial information and other pertinent details that need to remain private. For these reasons, privacy-preserving protocols are now being developed across the crypto ecosystem.
