The networking industry is considering homomorphic encryption, blockchains, and other cryptographic techniques to advance data protection and complicated computation, but a major barrier to many of them operating well and at scale has been the CPU power needed to execute them.
To solve this, Chain Reaction, an Israeli semiconductor startup focused on disruptive blockchain and privacy devices raised $70M in its Series C funding round led by Morgan Creek Digital and participation from Hanaco Ventures, Jerusalem Venture Partners, KCK Capital, Exor, Atreides Management, and BlueRun Ventures. This brings the total funding to $115M.
The funds will be used to build the engineering and development teams, which now number 100 full-time personnel and include top talent from Nvidia, Mellanox, Israeli Intelligence, and TSMC.
The money will also be utilised to accelerate the adoption of enterprise-grade blockchain solutions, including Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) and systems.
“We fully expect Chain Reaction’s blockchain products will become the new industry standard in blockchain compute infrastructure, laying the foundation for all future sustainable blockchain technologies” said Mark Yusko, CEO and CIO of Morgan Creek Capital Management and Managing Partner of Morgan Creek Digital. “Blockchain is the key to securing democracy, decentralization, and freedom, but it is compute intensive. Chain Reaction’s products will shore up the value of predominant blockchain technologies and revolutionize use-cases for blockchain technologies in the not-so-distant future.”
Pasha Romanovski, Founding Partner at Hanaco Ventures said, “Hanaco has believed in Chain Reaction from the get-go. We saw the potential of combining experience and expertise in analog and system design with algorithms and cryptography to engineer the future of compute infrastructure. This is just the beginning from Chain Reaction, as they make great strides in disrupting the traditional and complex market of data center, cloud, and through to edge computing hardware infrastructure.”
The Tel-Aviv-based startup expects its first blockchain hardware chips and systems to be widely available in the first quarter of 2023.
Nevertheless, the blockchain chip industry is not Chain Reaction’s sole objective; the company plans to produce another chip that will emerge by the end of 2024 and will give “completely homomorphic encryption” functionality. It means that users will be able to operate on data that has been encrypted while passing through the chip.
Founded in 2019 by Alon Webman and Oren Yokev, Chain Reaction engineers the future of disruptive blockchain and privacy technologies. The startup helps in accelerating compute performance, enabling companies to adopt and scale solutions to the complex problems. It partners with cloud and data centers to transform compute infrastructure, with custom ASICs and systems that optimize for low-power, high-performance compute.
