Silicon Valley-based hardware company Fabric Cryptography announced a $33 million Series A funding round to build computing chips, software and cryptographic algorithms. This round was co-led by Blockchain Capital and 1kx, with participation from leaders in the sector, such as Offchain Labs, Polygon, and Matter Labs. This follows a $6 million seed round led by Metaplanet with participation from Inflection and Liquid2 Ventures, amongst others. With this funding round, the company has raised $39 million in total.
Launched by MIT and Stanford dropouts Michael Gao and Tina Ju, along with AI hardware veterans such as Sagar Reddy, the team aims to use sophisticated hardware-software codesign techniques currently found in AI hardware to build a brand new processing unit for cryptography, which is called Verifiable Processing Unit (VPU).
The VPU is the first custom silicon chip that utilizes an instruction set architecture specific to cryptography. And this means that any cryptographic algorithm can be broken down into its mathematical building blocks that are natively accelerated and supported by the chip. 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.
Fabric Cryptography is building this 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).
Fabric has discovered a first market for advanced cryptography in the blockchain space, where ZKPs are a key solution for scaling decentralized infrastructure. For this application, Fabric has already received tens of millions of dollars in pre-orders for their VPUs. Fabric is also building a software stack which makes this new technology accessible to software developers, and several other algorithms that can keep your personal data private when using AI models in the cloud.
This funding will be used for the development of the next generation of Fabric’s VPU chips and the scaling of Fabric’s software and cryptography teams to develop additional software and cloud infrastructure to support growing market demand.
KEY QUOTES:
“There exists a whole world of advanced cryptographic algorithms that go beyond protecting our data, and can actually 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.”
- Fabric Cryptography’s Co-Founder and CEO Michael Gao
“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.”
- CEO Michael Gao
“What sets the VPU apart is its unique combination of programmability, flexibility, and performance. 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 productionized.”
- Dr. Wei Dai, cryptographer and research partner at 1kx
“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.”
- Yuan Han Li, investor at Blockchain Capital
