French startup Zama, an open-source cryptography company building Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) solutions for blockchain, today announced a €49 million Series B funding round to support Zama’s mainnet launch and ecosystem adoption.
The round was co-led by two leading U.S.-based investment firms Blockchange Ventures and Pantera Capital , bringing Zama’s total funding to over €129 million, and its valuation to north of a billion USD.
“With this latest raise, Zama becomes the world’s first unicorn in the FHE space, which is 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,” said Dr Rand Hindi, CEO and Co-founder of Zama. “The Series B round was structured to bring strategic blockchain investors into Zama’s ecosystem, focusing on partnership value rather than capital ahead of the launch of our mainnet and token.”
Founded in 2024 by Dr Pascal Paillier and Dr Rand Hindi, Zama is an open-source cryptography company building FHE solutions for blockchain. Its technology enables a broad range of use cases, from confidential finance to Web3 and network states.
Zama’s adoption is growing exponentially, with more than 5,000 developers using Zama’s various FHE libraries.
The funding coincides with the launch of Zama’s Confidential Blockchain Protocol and its public testnet – enabling developers to start building confidential applications – initially on Ethereum through Zama’s FHEVM, with support for other EVM chains and Solana to follow in 2026.
“Zama’s Fully Homomorphic Encryption protocol launch is a cryptography milestone. By enabling efficient, developer-friendly FHE, Zama unlocks secure, compliant, and verifiable dApps for AI, crypto, and cloud,” said Paul Veradittakit, Managing Partner at Pantera. “The protocol paves the way for onchain identity, financial, and consumer applications – previously out of reach for developers.”
The Zama Protocol enables developers to create confidential dApps, without any knowledge of cryptography. Zama’s FH EVM makes it possible to run confidential smart contracts on encrypted data, guaranteeing both confidentiality and composability. Blockchain-native confidentiality unlocks several important use cases, including:
- Onchain Finance: Zama enables financial institutions to securely use public blockchains for a range of applications, including confidential stablecoin issuance and payments, asset tokenisation, compliance, and more.
- Confidential Tokens: The ability to keep balances and amounts encrypted onchain enables blockchain companies to distribute tokens confidentially. Investors, team members and other token holders no longer have to publicly disclose their ownership, allowing them to better manage their portfolio and reduce the risk of being targeted by hackers.
- Identity and Proof of Humanity: The ability to distinguish between humans and AI in onchain applications is essential to the security of onchain finance. With the Zama Protocol, application developers can verify whether a user is human, without disclosing their identity publicly.
- Network States: Zama enables onchain communities and network states to operate confidentially. From currency to identity, governance and registries, it now becomes feasible to run key infrastructure on public blockchains.
“Zama is commercializing an entirely new generational technology that could redefine how confidentiality is handled in the blockchain and, ultimately, in all of cloud computing,” said Ken Seiff, Co-Managing Partner of Blockchange Ventures. “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, defense, 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 will use the fresh funding to advance the field of Fully Homomorphic Encryption and further commercialise its accessibility to blockchain applications and beyond.
To that end, Zama is actively addressing the core challenges that have historically held back FHE adoption, including:
- Speed: At current benchmarks, Zama’s FHE technology is reprotedly 100x faster than when the company was founded, and is now capable of supporting most onchain payment use cases. Zama is expecting its technology to be 100x more scalable within the next five years, allowing it to address the most demanding onchain applications.
- Hardware integration: Using GPUs enables Zama to scale to hundreds of transactions per second. Zama is working towards a dedicated hardware-accelerated chip to advance FHE performance, with the ultimate goal of reaching tens of thousands of transactions per second.
- Developer usability: Using Zama doesn’t require learning new programming languages. Instead, developers can use Solidity and other existing languages, and deploy their applications on their preferred chain.
“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. We’ve worked hard to remove the historical barriers around performance and accessibility, and now we’re focused on getting this technology into the hands of builders and real-world products,” added Hindi. “This round also underscores a broader shift: confidentiality is no longer a niche concern – it’s a foundational requirement. The broad adoption of blockchain in finance is driving demand for secure, confidential computing technologies.”
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2025/06/paris-based-cryptography-startup-zama-secures-e49-million-to-bring-end-to-end-encryption-to-public-blockchains/
