The archive · Developer & Business Tools · Product decision · 2020–2024
Zama's encrypted-compute bet: $73M Series A for usable homomorphic encryption
Paris's Zama bets fully homomorphic encryption is finally practical: compute on encrypted data, no decryption. $73M Series A, $50M+ signed in six months.
Zama
What the business is
Open-source FHE libraries — Concrete, TFHE-rs and fhEVM — that let developers compute on encrypted data for AI privacy and confidential blockchain smart contracts.
Starting capital：$8M pre-seed plus seed, then a $73M Series A co-led by Multicoin Capital and Protocol Labs on March 7, 2024 at a valuation approaching $400M — $81M total, the largest round ever for a homomorphic-encryption company (TechCrunch).
How it started
Rand Hindi and Pascal Paillier built Zama in Paris around homomorphic encryption; the underlying work began in 2016, and a 2019 breakthrough sped up the calculations roughly 100x, making the product bet credible.
What happened
Zama released four open-source libraries adopted by 3,000 developers, commercialized first with blockchain customers willing to pay per transaction or per contract, and signed more than $50M in contract value within six months of starting to sell; the Series A, announced March 7, 2024, valued the company at nearly $400M.
How it ended up
Still independent and scaling at the raise: a 75-person team, with Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko and Ethereum/Polkadot co-founder Gavin Wood among the round's participants alongside Estonian deep-tech investor Metaplanet.
Background
Zama was built in Paris by Rand Hindi (ex-Snips) and Pascal Paillier around fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), the decades-old idea that you can compute on encrypted data without ever decrypting it. Work began in 2016, and a 2019 breakthrough sped up the underlying math roughly 100x, turning the idea into a plausible product.
Zama's wedge was to open-source the tooling — the Concrete, TFHE-rs and fhEVM libraries — so developers could try encrypted compute without a research team. By March 2024, 3,000 developers were using its four libraries, and the company had signed more than $50M in contract value within six months of commercializing, mostly with blockchain customers paying for confidential smart contracts.
On March 7, 2024 Zama announced a $73M Series A co-led by Multicoin Capital and Protocol Labs at a valuation approaching $400M, bringing total funding to $81M — the largest round ever raised by a homomorphic-encryption company, according to TechCrunch. The round valued a bet that FHE would secure both blockchain privacy and data exchange around AI training and inference.
What has to be true
- Zama shipped FHE as developer tools rather than research papers, compressing the gap between 'the math works' and 'a developer can build with it'.
- Blockchain buyers were the right first market: they are structurally exposed to transparency and paid per transaction or per contract, so FHE's overhead became a price, not a blocker.
- The open-source libraries became its sales channel — 3,000 developers and a 24.8k-star fhEVM repo — letting demand arrive instead of being hunted.
- The 2019 ~100x speedup mattered strategically: it moved FHE from 'impossible' to 'expensive' — venture money arrived exactly when that framing changed.
What can be applied
A moonshot tech becomes a business when you give away the hard part as open-source tools and charge for the application — first paying customers are the ones legally forced to need it.
Aftermath
After the March 2024 raise Zama kept shipping: by September 2026 the fhEVM smart-contract library had grown to 24,819 GitHub stars and the org's public repos showed a push into accelerated encrypted compute (kms, coprocessor and hardware-register projects), signaling a move from pure software FHE toward hardware acceleration to cut remaining overhead.
Sources
- Zama's homomorphic encryption tech lands it $73M on a valuation of nearly $400M
- Cryptography Firm Zama Raises $73M for 'Fully Homomorphic Encryption' Apps
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