Open-source cryptography company Zama has raised $57M in a series B funding round to bring end-to-end encryption to public blockchains.
The company, known for building state-of-the-art Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) solutions for blockchain, received backing from leading U.S. blockchain investors such as Blockchange Ventures and Pantera Capital, making it the world’s first Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) company.
With this milestone, Zama has a total funding of over $150 million, and its valuation is over a billion dollars. The new funding will go into Zama’s upcoming mainnet launch, ecosystem adoption, and research efforts to make fintech applications built with FHE scale to thousands of transactions per second.
Zama’s announcement is timely, considering there has never been a higher need for confidential, scalable, and compliant on-chain financial applications in the finance ecosystem than now: Dr Rand Hindi, CEO and co-founder of Zama.
“With this latest raise, Zama becomes the world’s first unicorn in the FHE space, 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.”
Zama is also launching the public test net for its Confidential Blockchain Protocol in July 2025. This protocol enables developers to build confidential applications through the company’s FHEVM, with support for other EVM chains and Solana to follow.
Zama’s FHEVM makes it possible to run confidential smart contracts on encrypted data, guaranteeing confidentiality and composability. This confidentiality unlocks several use cases, which include:
- Onchain Finance, through which Zama enables financial institutions to securely use public blockchains for confidential stablecoin issuance and payments, asset tokenization, compliance, etc.
- Confidential Tokens allow balances and amounts to be encrypted on-chain, enabling blockchain companies to distribute tokens confidentially. Investors, team members, and token holders no longer have to publicly disclose their ownership, giving them security from bad actors.
- Identity and Proof of Humanity is an application that enables users to distinguish between humans and AI in on-chain applications. This is an essential use case for the security of on-chain finance, and the Zama Protocol makes it possible for application developers to verify identities securely.
- Network States: Zama enables on-chain communities and network states to operate confidentially, making it possible to run key infrastructure on public blockchains securely now.
- Speed: Zama’s FHE technology is currently 100x faster than when the company was founded and can now support most on-chain payment use cases. The project expects its technology to be 100x more scalable within five years, enabling it to serve even the most demanding applications.
- Hardware integration: Thanks to GPUs, Zama can scale to hundreds of transactions per second. The project is also working towards reaching tens of thousands of transactions per second by using a dedicated hardware-accelerated chip to advance FHE performance.
- Developer usability: Zama is easy for developers to use because it doesn’t require learning new programming languages. Instead, developers can easily deploy their applications on their preferred chain using Solidity and other existing languages.
Apart from using the fresh funding to advance the field of FHE and further commercialize its accessibility to blockchain applications, Zama is also working towards addressing key issues that have historically held back FHE adoption: