Seismic has raised $10 million in a round led by a16z to break the privacy barrier that’s kept fintechs from using public blockchains for sensitive services like private credit and cash accounts.
Announced Nov. 12 by founder Lyron Co Ting Keh, the funding — joined by Polychain, dao5, Amber Group, TrueBridge Capital, and LayerZero Labs — brings the startup’s total to $17 million after its March seed round.
Keh pointed to surging fintech interest in crypto for cross-border payments and lending, but identified the inherent transparency of public ledgers as a critical roadblock for handling sensitive user data.
Seismic is building an encrypted blockchain with privacy embedded at the base protocol — a departure from the wallet-level or app-layer tools that dominate today. Already live in devnet, the network allows smart contracts to process sensitive data without exposing it on a public ledger. Early partners include Brookwell, which offers stablecoin-based cash accounts, and Cred Protocol, which provides private credit scoring.
The company expects to begin generating revenue early next year through per-transaction fees, eventually expanding into fiat ramps and card programs.
The new round comes just months after a16z first backed the company in June. At the time, the firm argued that the radical transparency of major L1s remains a “critical barrier” for industries like financial services and healthcare. Zero-knowledge proofs can guarantee correctness, they noted, but often “hamper composability,” making applications that require shared private state nearly impossible. Seismic’s architecture, they argued, offers a way around that.
The momentum also reflects a broader industry shift: blockchain privacy is moving from niche add-on to prerequisite for mainstream adoption. A16z’s policy leads have compared the moment to the early internet, which needed HTTPS before e-commerce could take off — arguing blockchains now require similar foundational privacy layers to mature.
