Fabric Cryptography raises $33m to enhance privacy

Fabric Cryptography, a Silicon Valley startup focused on improving privacy in the digital ecosystem, has raised $33 million in funding co-led by Blockchain Capital and 1kx.

According to a press release shared with Crypto.news, Fabric Cryptography said the funding will allow it to focus on next-generation cryptography. The company aims to drive real-world adoption of privacy guarantees by leveraging new technology to improve encryption and authentication.

To achieve this, Fabric is leveraging AI for its Verifiable Processing Unit (VPU). The startup claims that the VPU is an AI chip designed to bring advanced features to cryptography, similar to how Nvidia’s chips are revolutionizing the AI ​​industry. Fabric’s VPU is positioned as the equivalent of the AI-powered graphics processing units currently driving the AI ​​revolution.

The funding will help make this new chip a reality, adding ‘mathematical trust’ to the privacy and big data market. The startup, co-founded by MIT and Stanford dropouts Michael Gao and Tina Ju, has also received backing from Polygon, Offchain Labs, and Matter Labs.

Commenting on the Series A funding round and what it means, Fabric Cryptography co-founder Michael Gao said:

“There is a world of advanced cryptographic algorithms that go beyond protecting our data and could begin to guarantee trust if we could get them to work efficiently. Billions of dollars have been spent on all sorts of better AI chips, but researchers and industry projects in cryptography have had to make do with CPUs or GPUs that were never built for the kind of intensive math that advanced cryptography uses.”

In addition to funding the production of its new chip, Fabric plans to use the funding to scale its software and cryptography teams, as well as its cloud infrastructure.

The $33 million funding round follows $6 million raised in a seed round. Fabric raised $39 million in total in a previous round led by Metaplanet.

When will the VPU go into production?

Fabric expects its silicon chip to enter production later this year. Once deployed, the chip will offer faster speeds compared to core compute units, GPUs, and fixed-function cryptography accelerators.

VPU is designed to complement and improve cryptographic algorithms that currently offer greater privacy guarantees, such as zero-knowledge proofs, fully homomorphic encryption, and multi-party computation. In particular, these are the problems that privacy-focused cryptocurrencies like Zcash (ZEC) are targeting for user adoption.

But experts worry that surveillance hardware could undermine cryptocurrencies’ advances in privacy and data protection.