Fabric Cryptography, a Silicon Valley-based hardware startup, has successfully raised $33 million in a Series A funding round, co-led by Blockchain Capital and 1kx, to develop advanced computing chips designed for data privacy. This follows a $6 million seed round led by Metaplanet, with participation from Inflection and Liquid2 Ventures, among others.
In an announcement on August 19, the startup revealed that it is working on a new cryptography processing unit called the Verifiable Processing Unit (VPU). This silicon chip features a cryptography-specific instruction set architecture, enabling it to break down any cryptographic algorithm into its mathematical components, which are then natively accelerated and supported by the chip.
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The VPU is expected to enter production later this year, offering improvements in speed and cost efficiency for cryptographic workloads compared to traditional central processing units (CPUs) and graphical processing units (GPUs).
Fabric Cryptography was founded by former MIT and Stanford students Michael Gao, Tina Ju, and Sagar Reddy. Gao emphasized the potential of advanced cryptographic algorithms to guarantee trust if run efficiently, noting the industry’s reliance on CPUs and GPUs, which are not optimized for the intensive mathematical operations required by advanced cryptography.
The startup has identified a strong market demand for its hardware, particularly in the blockchain space, where zero-knowledge proofs are increasingly used to enhance privacy and security in on-chain transactions. Fabric Cryptography has already secured “tens of millions of dollars in pre-orders” for its VPUs from the Web3 industry.
In addition to hardware, the company is developing a software stack to make its technology accessible to developers. According to Dr. Wei Dai, cryptographer and research partner at 1kx, the VPU is programmable to efficiently handle virtually any cryptographic workload and is future-proof, capable of adapting to new cryptographic algorithms as they are developed and implemented.
Cre: cointelegraph
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