Two rounds of funding of $130 million, one article to learn about Zama, a unicorn focused on FHE technology

Author: momo, ChainCatcher

Recently, Zama, an open-source cryptography project focusing on fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), has finally launched a testnet.

In just over a year, Zama has raised $130 million through two large rounds of funding, valuing it at $1 billion.

In June 2025, Zama completed another 5700 round led by Pantera Capital and Blockchange$10,000 Series B financing.

In March 2024, Zama completed a funding round led by Multicoin Capital and Protocol LabsGavin Wood, founder of Blockchange, Stake Capital, Metaplanet, Ethereum Co-creation & Polkadot7300 of well-known institutional or individual investors such as Anatoly Yakovenko and Juan Benet, founder of Filecoin $10,000 Series A financing.

What is Zama's open-source fully homomorphic encryption technology? Why do you attract large amounts of money to bet on? What's the recent development? This article has made a brief combing.

What is fully homomorphic encryption? How is it different from ZK?

In addition to ZK, another key privacy technology named by Vitalik is fully homomorphic encryption (FHE).

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) allows arbitrarily complex computations to be performed directly on encrypted data without first decrypting the data.

The result of the computation is still encrypted, and only the user with the key can decrypt it to get the final result.

The core advantage of FHE is the privacy of data and computation, even the nodes that perform the computation, such as cloud servers or blockchain nodes, cannot access the plaintext data.

It seems to be very similar to ZK, but both are very different. FHE emphasizes privacy-preserving computing, and ZK emphasizes privacy-based verification. In other words, FHE allows us to perform arbitrary calculations while the data is fully encrypted, while ZK allows us to verify that a claim is true without knowing the process or the original data. The two are more of a complementary relationship, with FHE providing on-chain cryptographic computation and ZK ensuring verification privacy.

Zama's technical progress and roadmap

Although FHE is an innovative technology to ensure privacy, it has been difficult to use in the past due to its slow speed, limited application, and difficulty for developers to use. Zama has been working to solve these technical problems.

Zama's official white paper says that Zama has developed highly efficient FHE technology that is 100 times faster than it was five years agoGPU-accelerated, soon capable of supporting 100+ transactions per second, or thousands of transactions per second with dedicated hardware such as FPGAs and ASICs.

In terms of developer friendliness, it supports any type of application as well as common programming languages like Solidity and Python. In addition, Zama's FHE technology is post-quantum-safe, meaning that there are no known quantum algorithms to crack.

In addition to FHE, the Zama protocol also combines multi-party computation (MPC) and zero-knowledge proofs (ZK) to make up for the shortcomings of encryption schemes.

Recently, Zama announced the launch of a public testnet. Zama。 It was also revealed that the mainnet is expected to be launched on Ethereum in the fourth quarter of this year, bringing confidentiality features to Ethereum. Initially, only Zama-approved apps will be supported. In addition, Zama plans to conduct TGE by the end of the year and expand to more EVM-compatible chains.

In 2026, Zama aims to deploy on Solana to support Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) applications.

Zama focuses on the direction of the application

What are the future use cases for Zama? Zama mentioned three typical scenarios: crypto payments, RWA, and DigitalFine.

Crypto payments: The Zama protocol implements end-to-end encryption of stablecoin payments through FHE, protecting the privacy of account balances and transfer amounts, while embedding compliance functions (such as KYC/AML) in smart contracts to support credit card payments, payroll, Cross-border remittances and other scenarios to meet the confidentiality and compliance requirements of on-chain financial transactions.

RWA: Zama enables traditional financial institutions to tokenize assets (e.g., fund shares, stocks, bonds) on public blockchains (e.g., Ethereum, Solana), maintaining the confidentiality of trading activity and investor identities. KYC/AML checks are performed directly through smart contracts, eliminating the need for a private blockchain, enabling inter-agency interoperability.

DeFi: The Zama protocol supports end-to-end encrypted DeFi transactions by encrypting transaction amounts and asset types , solving the problem of users' reluctance to disclose assets and bot front-running transactions. Other applications include confidential lending, on-chain credit scoring, option pricing, and more to enhance DeFi privacy and user experience

Zama's team background

Zama's ability to secure large sums of money from multiple well-known investment institutions and individual investors may be inseparable from his team's senior background in the field of cryptography.

Zama is led by Dr. Rand Hindi (CEO) and Dr. Pascal Paillier (CTO) Founded in 2020, nearly half of the team has PhDs in cryptography, machine learning, or blockchain.

Rand Hindi, co-founder and CEO of Zama, is an expert in artificial intelligence and privacy protection technology with a Ph.D. in bioinformatics with a focus on data privacy and AI applications. He started programming at the age of 10 and created a social network at the age of 14. He founded Snips, an AI voice platform (later acquired by Sonos), where he was exposed to fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) and used it as a Zama's core technology direction. Hindi is also a partner at Unit Ventures, where he has invested in several cryptography, AI, and biotech companies.

Pascal Paillier, Co-Founder and CTO of Zama, has over 25 years of experience in the IT security industry, focusing on the design and development of secure cryptographic primitives such as fully homomorphic encryption, anonymous credentials, etc.), as well as cryptographic software for embedded architectures (e.g., smart cards).

Pascal Paillier has published dozens of research papers in the field and holds around 25 patents, many of which are currently applied to smart card technology. Pascal Paillier is also a member of the International Association for the Study of Cryptography (IACR) and has worked on ISO SC 27 WG 2 (Cryptography Standard) in 2005Asiacrypt Best Paper Award.

Pascal Paillier is also a serial entrepreneur and founded a consulting firm in applied cryptography before founding ZamaCryptoExperts。

(Recommended reading: Interview with Zama CEO: How to build a $400 million market value in four years, FHE "wave makers"? 》