Silicon Valley startup Fabric Cryptography has secured $33 million in a Series A funding round to build a specialized chip focused on improving data privacy and security.
The round was co-led by Blockchain Capital and 1kx, with participation from Off-chain Labs, Polygon, and Matter Labs. This follows a $6 million seed round led by Metaplanet, which included investors like Inflection and Liquid2 Ventures.
According to an August 19 announcement, Fabric Cryptography is working on a new cryptography-focused chip called the Verifiable Processing Unit (VPU). This chip is designed to handle cryptographic processes more efficiently than standard CPUs and GPUs, which are not optimized for the complex maths involved in cryptography.
Additionally, the VPU’s architecture is tailored to break down cryptographic algorithms into simpler parts, allowing for faster and more cost-effective processing.
The company was founded by former MIT and Stanford students Michael Gao, Tina Ju, and Sagar Reddy. According to Gao, many advanced cryptographic algorithms have the potential to provide strong security and trust, but they require hardware that can run them efficiently—something current processors struggle to do.
The VPU has already attracted attention from the blockchain industry, where privacy and security concerns are driving interest in technologies like zero-knowledge proofs. Fabric Cryptography reports that it has already received substantial pre-orders from the Web3 sector, reflecting strong demand for its technology.
In addition to the hardware, the company is developing software tools to help developers use the VPU more easily. Dr. Wei Dai, a cryptographer at 1kx, emphasized that the VPU is designed to be adaptable, so it can keep up with new cryptography advancements. Fabric Cryptography plans to start producing the chip later this year.
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