Silicon Valley hardware startup Fabric Cryptography announced on August 19 its $33 million Series A funding round to build computing chips, software and cryptographic algorithms. This Series A funding round was co-led by Blockchain Capital and 1kx, with participation from leaders in the sector, such as Offchain Labs, Polygon, and Matter Labs. It follows a $6m seed round led by Metaplanet with participation from Inflection and Liquid2 Ventures amongst others. Total funds raised stand at $39m.
Founded by Michael Gao and Tina Ju, along with hardware veterans such as Sagar Reddy, the team aims to use state-of-the art hardware-software codesign techniques currently found in AI hardware to build a brand new processing unit for cryptography, which they call the Verifiable Processing Unit (VPU). It will do for cryptography what Nvidia’s GPUs and many other startups’ chips are doing for AI.
“There exists a whole world of advanced cryptographic algorithms that go beyond protecting our data, and can actually begin to guarantee trust, if we can run them efficiently. Billions of dollars have been poured into better AI chips of all kinds, but researchers and industry projects in cryptography have had to settle with CPUs or GPUs, which were never made for the kind of intensive math that advanced cryptography uses,” said Fabric Cryptography’s co-founder and CEO, Michael Gao.
The VPU is the first custom silicon chip that uses an instruction set architecture specific to cryptography. This means that any cryptographic algorithm can be broken down into its mathematical building blocks that are natively accelerated and supported by the chip. Going into production later this year, the VPU is poised to drastically improve the speed and cost of running advanced cryptographic workloads, compared to CPUs, GPUs, and fixed-function cryptography accelerators.
Fabric Cryptography is building the VPU at a time when cryptographic algorithms can make guarantees far more significant than simple encryption. Rapid progress is being made in algorithms that enable anyone to prove facts about a dataset while keeping the data itself private like Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), algorithms that will enable secure computation on private data like Fully-Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), and algorithms that can allow two parties that don’t fully trust each other to work together like Multi-Party Computation (MPC).
Gao added, “Supporting cryptographers’ most ambitious ideas is core to the Fabric mission, because of the power these ideas could have anywhere we interact with the digital world. Our mission is to scale the speed and availability of next-gen cryptography through exponential advances across the hardware and software stack. We’ll know we’ve succeeded when trust and privacy are foundational to every digital interaction.”
Source: Fabric Cryptography
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