Processing…
Success! You're on the list.
NEWSLETTER

Processing…
Success! You're on the list.

Fabric Cryptography raises $33M to develop first-of-its-kind processing unit for cryptography

Fabric Cryptography
Picture credits: Fabric Cryptography

Silicon Valley hardware startup Fabric Cryptography has secured $33 million in Series A funding. The 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 $6 million seed round led by Metaplanet (which invested in Granza Bio and Hume AI) with participation from Inflection and Liquid2 Ventures amongst others. With this, the total investment raised by the company accounts for $39 million. 

Funds utilisation

The fresh capital will fund the development of the next generation of Fabric’s VPU chips and the scaling of its software and cryptography teams to develop additional software and cloud infrastructure to support growing market demand.

“We could not be more thrilled to partner with Fabric on their mission to accelerate all cryptographic operations with the world’s first VPU to help bring about a world where privacy and verifiability are non-negotiable components of all digital systems,” said Yuan Han Li, investor at Blockchain Capital.

“What sets the VPU apart is its unique combination of programmability, flexibility, and performance,” said Dr Wei Dai, cryptographer and research partner at 1kx. “The VPU can be programmed to run virtually any cryptographic workload efficiently using its innovative instruction set. Unlike other fixed-function chips, which are common in cryptography, the VPU is future-proof — it can adapt to new cryptography algorithms as they are developed and productionised.”

What challenge does it tackle?

There exists a whole world of advanced cryptographic algorithms that go beyond protecting our data and can 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. 

The Verifiable Processing Unit (VPU), a new processing unit for cryptography developed by Fabric Cryptography is the first-of-its-kind custom silicon chip that uses an instruction set architecture specific to cryptography.

What does the company do?

The company was founded by MIT and Stanford dropouts Michael Gao and Tina Ju, along with hardware veterans such as Sagar Reddy. It 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 VPU. It will do for cryptography what Nvidia’s GPUs and many other startups’ chips are doing for AI.

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).

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.

In the future, Fabric Cryptography wants to build on its full stack hardware platform to bring these transformative privacy and trust guarantees to AI, finance, medtech, insurance, and more. They believe creating a general purpose chip that can adapt to any cryptographic algorithm is crucial to this goal.

Fabric Cryptography’s Co-Founder and CEO Michael Gao said “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.”

Related Posts
Total
0
Share

Get daily funding news briefings in the tech world delivered right to your inbox.

Enter Your Email
join our newsletter. thank you