French cryptography company Zama has just made history, becoming the first fully homomorphic encryption unicorn with a massive $57 million Series B raised. Co-led by Blockchange Ventures and Pantera Capital, this brings Zama’s total funding to over $150 million, pushing its valuation over the $1 billion mark.
Zama, founded by Dr Pascal Paillier and Dr Rand Hindi, is building cutting-edge fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) solutions that allow data to be processed while it stays encrypted. Yes, you read that right, no decryption needed. This has massive implications for blockchain, cloud computing, and onchain finance.
“With this raise, Zama becomes the world’s first unicorn in the FHE space,” said CEO Dr Rand Hindi. “It shows the market's belief in FHE technology and our ability to deliver real confidentiality for financial applications onchain.”
FHE lets you compute directly on encrypted data. Imagine doing calculations in a locked box without ever opening it. That’s the power of fully homomorphic encryption, and Zama is at the forefront.
The tech behind FHE enables secure data processing for confidential finance, Web3 applications, decentralised identity, and network states. Zama’s new FHEVM makes it possible to build smart contracts that are both confidential and composable, something that’s been nearly impossible until now.
Big Use Cases: What Zama Unlocks
- Confidential Finance: Banks and fintechs can build privacy-first apps on public blockchains.
- Confidential Tokens: Investors can own tokens without making their holdings public.
- Proof of Humanity: Verify humans online without revealing their identity.
- Network States: Run currencies, governance, and identities onchain, but privately.
And all this, using familiar languages like Solidity. No need to learn a new stack.
Zama’s funding comes as demand spikes for secure, scalable blockchain tools. With regulations tightening and finance shifting onchain, confidentiality is becoming non-negotiable.
The company just launched its Confidential Blockchain Protocol and public testnet on Ethereum, with Solana and other EVM chains in the pipeline for 2026.
The funding will fuel Zama’s mainnet launch, expansion of its growing developer ecosystem (already 5,000+ devs), and hardware development for even faster transaction speeds.
Currently, Zama’s tech can process hundreds of encrypted transactions per second using GPUs. The team is working on a hardware chip that will boost that to tens of thousands per second.
“This is our third and largest investment in Zama,” said Ken Seiff, Co-Managing Partner at Blockchange Ventures. “Not since Ethereum have we seen a tech this foundational.”
From finance and AI to healthcare and defence, fully homomorphic encryption could become a pillar of secure cloud computing. Zama is solving the biggest blockers: speed, scale, and ease of use, making this breakthrough tech accessible for real-world applications.
As Dr Rand Hindi put it:
We believe most blockchain transactions will need to be confidential. Our goal is to get FHE into the hands of builders, and into products the world uses.”