Fabric Cryptography raises $33m to enhance privacy

As a seasoned crypto investor with over a decade of experience in the tech industry, I find Fabric Cryptography’s recent Series A funding round to be a promising development. Having worked extensively in Silicon Valley and closely followed advancements in cryptography, AI, and blockchain technology, I am intrigued by the potential of Fabric’s Verifiable Processing Unit (VPU).


A startup named Fabric Cryptography, based in Silicon Valley, which concentrates on boosting privacy within digital platforms, has successfully raised $33 million in investment. This round was jointly spearheaded by Blockchain Capital and 1kx.

As a crypto investor, I’ve learned from a recent press release that Fabric Cryptography has secured funding, allowing them to concentrate on the upcoming wave of cryptographic advancements. Their goal is to foster widespread acceptance of privacy assurances in practical applications, utilizing cutting-edge tech to boost encryption and authentication capabilities.

As an analyst, I’m excited about Fabric’s approach to leverage artificial intelligence within their Verifiable Processing Unit (VPU). This innovative technology, developed by Fabric, is essentially an AI chip, designed to elevate cryptography capabilities, much like Nvidia’s chips are transforming the AI sector. In simpler terms, Fabric’s VPU can be thought of as the powerful, AI-enhanced counterpart to the graphic processing units that are currently fueling the AI revolution.

The financial support will enable the materialization of this novel chip, enhancing the trust in mathematics for privacy and big data sectors. This innovative venture, co-founded by dropouts Michael Gao and Tina Ju from MIT and Stanford respectively, has also gained investment from Polygon, Offchain Labs, and Matter Labs.

Discussing the recent Series A funding round, Michael Gao, a co-founder of Fabric Cryptography, shared his thoughts on its significance.

In simpler terms, there are numerous sophisticated encryption techniques out there that do more than just secure our data; they can establish trust as well. However, these complex calculations require significant computational power, a need that hasn’t been fully met by AI chips. Unfortunately, the majority of research and projects related to cryptography have had to make do with regular Central Processing Units (CPUs) or Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), which were not designed for the type of intense mathematical operations these advanced encryption methods require.

Beyond just bankrolling the manufacturing of its latest chip, Fabric also intends to employ the funds for expanding its software, cryptography groups, and cloud resources.

As a researcher, I’m thrilled to share that our recent funding round amounted to $33 million, bringing our total funds raised to an impressive $39 million. This new round follows the $6 million we secured in our initial seed round. Notably, the earlier round was spearheaded by Metaplanet.

When does VPU go into production?

The silicon chip produced by Fabric is anticipated to start manufacturing towards the end of this year. Upon release, this chip promises faster performance over central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), and specialized cryptography accelerators for encryption tasks.

The VPU is built to enhance and optimize cryptographic techniques already providing stronger privacy assurances, such as zero-knowledge proofs, fully-homomorphic encryption, and multi-party computation. These are specifically areas that privacy-centric cryptocurrencies like Zcash (ZEC) aim to address for increased user acceptance.

As a researcher, I find myself concerned about the potential impact of surveillance hardware on the advancements in privacy and data protection within the realm of cryptography. The fear among experts is that this technology may compromise these very aspects that make cryptocurrencies appealing.

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2024-08-19 18:08