Cryptography startup Zama paid $73 million to protect data privacy.

French cryptography startup Zama is moving forward with big plans to enable decryption of encrypted data after securing $73 million in a Series A funding round.

The raise, led by major industry investors Multicoin Capital and Protocol Lab, aims to promote the use of Zama's Full Homomorphic Encryption (FHA) technology, CEO Rand Hindy announced on March 7.

Described in Hindi as the “holy grail of cryptography,” Zama's FHE aims to make data privacy a standard feature on the Internet while enabling data processing in applications such as cloud computing.

“Imagine you have a secret message that you want to hide, but without seeing the actual message you need someone else to do the math,” Zama's chief technology officer Pascal Paillier told Cointelegraph.

FHE is like a “magic box” where you store your secret message, Pilier said, adding that users can lock the box after the message is entered. And so he said.

“The magic part is that someone else can still do the math on the locked box or see your secret. When you're done, you can open the box and see the math result, your message is still safe and private inside.”

According to Pillier, since its founding in 2020, Zama has landed a number of important customers, including Shiba In, which has used Zama technology to “build the entire network environment.” SHIB adopted a new FHE-enabled privacy infrastructure at the end of February 2024, aiming to improve on-chain privacy.

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“By making FHE more accessible and efficient for developers to use, ZAMA eventually wants to encourage businesses to use cloud computing and other technologies without compromising privacy,” said Pillier. This approach involves creating user-friendly tools, libraries or platforms that integrate FHE into everyday digital services, making it easier for companies to adopt this advanced encryption without requiring specialized expertise, he added.

The Zama CTO also emphasized that the company's solution has made a significant difference in achieving the transition between on-chain transparency and off-chain secrecy.

Developers can deploy “the best of both worlds” or execute confidential smart contracts on encrypted data without increasing confidentiality or compilation, Pillier explained.

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