Silicon Valley startup Fabric Cryptography raised $33 million from Blockchain Capital and 1kx to increase digital economy privacy.
In a press release, Fabric Cryptography said that the money will enable the company to concentrate on developing new cryptography.
The company’s goal is to encourage the practical implementation of privacy guarantees by improving authentication and encryption through new technologies.
Fabric’s Verifiable Processing Unit (VPU) uses artificial intelligence to do this. Similar to how Nvidia’s chips are transforming the AI sector, the startup claims that the VPU is an AI chip created to provide cryptography additional functionality.
The VPU from Fabric is positioned as the modern-day analogue to the AI revolution’s AI-powered graphics processing units.
The money will contribute to developing this new microprocessor, giving the big data and privacy markets “mathematical trust.” Polygon, Offchain Labs, and Matter Labs all supported the firm, co-founded by Stanford and MIT dropouts Michael Gao and Tina Ju.
Co-founder of Fabric Cryptography Michael Gao offered the following commentary on the Series A fundraising round and its implications:
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.”
In addition to using the funds to produce its new device, Fabric intends to expand its cloud infrastructure, software, and cryptography teams.
The $6 million raised in a seed round is followed by the $33 million investment round. With Metaplanet leading the previous round, Fabric has now raised a total of $39 million.
When does VPU go into production?
Fabric plans to start producing its silicon chip later in the year. After it is implemented, the chip will be faster than GPUs, fixed-function cryptography accelerators, and core CPUs.
Zero-knowledge proofs, fully-homomorphic encryption, and multi-party computation are just a few of the cryptographic algorithms that the VPU is intended to enhance and supplement.
Notably, privacy-focused cryptocurrencies like Zcash aim to address these concerns in order to increase user acceptance. Experts fear that surveillance gear would thwart cryptocurrency’s achievements in data security and privacy.
