Zama, a French cryptography company specialising in fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) solutions, has secured $57m (€48.4m) in a Series B funding round.
The funding, co-led by Blockchange Ventures and Pantera Capital, brings Zama’s total funding to more than $150m and its valuation to more than $1bn.
Zama said that the funding coincides with the launch of its confidential blockchain protocol and its public testnet.
These allow developers to build confidential applications on Ethereum via Zama’s FHEVM, with plans to support other Ethereum Virtual Machine chains and Solana by 2026.
The Zama Protocol enables the creation of confidential decentralised applications (dapps) without requiring cryptography knowledge.
Blockchange Ventures co-managing partner Ken Seiff said: “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.
“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.”
Zama CEO Rand Hindi said: “We believe that ultimately most blockchain transactions will need to be confidential. Our mainnet is coming, and this testnet gives developers early access to FHE so they can start building and exploring this technology for these applications.
“This round also underscores a broader shift: confidentiality is no longer a niche concern — it is a foundational requirement. The broad adoption of blockchain in finance is driving demand for secure, confidential computing technologies.”
Zama’s FHEVM facilitates the execution of confidential smart contracts on encrypted data, ensuring confidentiality and composability.
The blockchain-native confidentiality opens up use cases, such as secure public blockchain utilisation by financial institutions for confidential stablecoin issuance, asset tokenisation, and compliance.
Zama’s technology allows blockchain companies to distribute tokens confidentially, keeping balances and amounts encrypted onchain.
It also ensures that investors and token holders can manage their portfolios without publicly disclosing ownership, reducing the risk of hacker targeting.
Additionally, the Zama Protocol enables application developers to verify user identity without public disclosure, enhancing onchain finance security.
Zama’s funding will advance FHE technology and its commercialisation for blockchain applications.
The company said it is addressing FHE adoption challenges, such as speed, with its technology now 100 times faster than at inception and capable of supporting most onchain payment use cases.
Zama aims to make its technology 100 times more scalable within five years.
To enhance FHE performance, Zama is integrating hardware solutions, including GPUs, to scale transactions per second.
The company is also developing a hardware-accelerated chip to handle tens of thousands of transactions per second.
