1. Investments and Partners
2. Chip Development and Features
3. Founders and Future Plans

Silicon Valley startup Fabric Cryptography has closed a $33 million Series A funding round to build new computing chips focusing on data privacy.

Investments and Partners

The funding round was co-led by Blockchain Capital and 1kx with participation from Offchain Labs, Polygon, and Matter Labs. The investment follows a $6 million seed round led by Metaplanet with participation from Inflection and Liquid2 Ventures.

Chip Development and Features

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. According to the company, this means that any cryptographic algorithm can be broken down into its mathematical building blocks that are natively accelerated and supported by the chip. The new chip is expected to go into production later this year and is planned to improve speed and cost running for cryptographic workloads when compared to central processing units (CPUs) and graphical processing units (GPUs).

Founders and Future Plans

The startup was founded by former MIT and Stanford students Michael Gao, Tina Ju, and Sagar Reddy. Michael Gao noted that there is a whole world of advanced cryptographic algorithms that can guarantee trust if they can be efficiently run. He mentioned that billions of dollars have been poured into better AI chips, but cryptography projects had to settle with CPUs or GPUs, which are not suited for the intensive math used in cryptography. 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. The startup has received tens of millions of dollars in pre-orders from the Web3 industry and is also working on a software stack to make the technology accessible to software developers. According to Dr. Wei Dai, cryptographer and research partner at 1kx, the VPU can be programmed to run virtually any cryptographic workload, making it future-proof and adaptable to new algorithms.

The project continues to evolve, garnering attention and investment, indicating its significance in the field of cryptography and data privacy. Fabric Cryptography plans to continue its developments, making its technologies accessible to a broader range of developers.