Fabric Cryptography, a Silicon Valley hardware startup, has closed a $33 million Series A funding round co-led by Blockchain Capital and 1kx to build new computing chips focusing on data privacy.
The round also saw the participation of Offchain Labs, Polygon, and Matter Labs. The investment follows a $6 million seed round led by Metaplanet with participation from Inflection and Liquid2 Ventures, among other investors.
According to an Aug. 19 announcement, the startup is developing a new cryptography processing unit called the Verifiable Processing Unit (VPU), a silicon chip that uses a cryptography-specific instruction set architecture. “This means that any cryptographic algorithm can be broken down into its mathematical building blocks that are natively accelerated and supported by the chip,” said the company.
Fabric has found a market fit for its hardware in the blockchain space amid the growing use of zero-knowledge proofs to improve privacy and security in onchain transactions. According to the startup, it has received “tens of millions of dollars in pre-orders for their VPUs” coming from the Web3 industry.
The startup is also working on a software stack to make the technology accessible to software developers.
“The VPU can be programmed to run virtually any cryptographic workload efficiently […]. 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 productionized,” said Dr. Wei Dai, cryptographer and research partner at 1kx.
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