Zama reaches unicorn status with USD $57 million funding round

Zama has raised USD $57 million in a Series B funding round, pushing its valuation above USD $1 billion and achieving unicorn status in the field of Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) for blockchain applications.

The latest funding, co-led by Pantera Capital and Blockchange Ventures, brings Zama's total funding to over USD $150 million. The company stated that the new investment would bolster the development of its mainnet, drive ecosystem adoption, and support continued research, with a particular focus on scaling financial applications built using FHE technology.

Confidentiality in blockchain

The announcement coincides with the launch of the Zama Protocol, a platform designed to facilitate the creation of confidential applications across any blockchain, with initial support for Ethereum. A public testnet has already been made available, and Zama outlined plans for a mainnet and token launch in the second half of 2025. The company noted that support for additional blockchains, such as other EVM chains and Solana, would follow in 2026.

Zama's FHE technology enables computations on encrypted data, making it suitable for use cases where privacy and compliance are essential. In the context of increased interest from financial institutions and tightening global regulations, Zama sees confidentiality as an essential requirement for on-chain activities.

"With this latest raise, Zama becomes the world's first unicorn in the FHE space, which is a major milestone for the industry. Reaching a $1 billion valuation represents a significant increase that reflects the market's confidence in our FHE technology and our team's ability to deliver confidentiality to financial applications onchain," said Dr Rand Hindi, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of Zama. "The Series B round was structured to bring strategic blockchain investors into Zama's ecosystem, focusing on partnership value rather than capital ahead of the launch of our mainnet and token."

The Series B round received continued support from existing investors, and Zama emphasised that this round was strategically positioned to foster partnerships within the blockchain ecosystem.

Growing developer adoption

The Zama Protocol enables developers to build confidential, decentralised applications (dApps) without requiring expertise in cryptography. Through Zama's FHEVM, confidential smart contracts can process encrypted data, maintaining both privacy and composability. The protocol aims to make confidential computing more accessible by allowing developers to use familiar programming tools, such as Solidity, and deploy on their preferred blockchain.

Zama's FHE technology is now 100 times faster than when the company was founded, and it currently supports most payment-related use cases on-chain. The company revealed ongoing work on a dedicated hardware-accelerated chip aimed at facilitating transaction throughput in the tens of thousands of transactions per second. Integration with GPUs already enables hundreds of transactions every second.

The growing developer community for Zama is reflected by more than 5,000 developers using its FHE libraries to date.

Broader applications for FHE

Zama outlined several primary use cases enabled by its protocol, including on-chain finance, confidential tokens, identity verification, network states, and more. Among these are confidential stablecoin issuance and payments, asset tokenisation, and compliance for financial institutions.

The protocol also seeks to facilitate confidential token distribution, allowing holders to manage their allocations without exposing them to public scrutiny. Additionally, novel identity solutions could allow applications to distinguish between humans and artificial intelligence agents on-chain without disclosing personal identities.

Onchain communities and network states could benefit from confidential operations in areas such as governance and registries, now possible with the adoption of FHE.

"Zama is commercialising an entirely new generational technology that could redefine how confidentiality is handled in the blockchain and, ultimately, in all of cloud computing," said Ken Seiff, Co-Managing Partner of Blockchange Ventures. "This is our third and largest investment in Zama. Not since I first saw Ethereum in 2014, have I seen a company commercialising an entirely new technology that could be as foundational to our global technology infrastructure. As finance moves onchain and regulations tighten globally, public blockchains are likely to be the first beneficiaries of what Zama is building. But the opportunity goes well beyond that, as industries such as health care, defence, and virtually all others that use cloud computing could massively benefit from the stepchange in confidentiality and compliance pioneered by FHE, and in particular, Zama."

"Zama's Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) protocol launch is a cryptography milestone. By enabling efficient, developer-friendly FHE, Zama unlocks secure, compliant, and verifiable dApps for AI, crypto, and cloud," said Paul Veradittakit, Managing Partner at Pantera. "The protocol paves the way for onchain identity, financial, and consumer applications—previously out of reach for developers."

The company stated that wider adoption of blockchain in finance is increasing the need for secure and confidential computing technologies.

Dr Rand Hindi added, "We believe that ultimately most blockchain transactions will need to be confidential. Our mainnet is coming, and this testnet gives developers early access to FHE so they can start building and exploring this technology for these applications. We've worked hard to remove the historical barriers around performance and accessibility, and now we're focused on getting this technology into the hands of builders and real-world products. This round also underscores a broader shift: confidentiality is no longer a niche concern—it's a foundational requirement. The broad adoption of blockchain in finance is driving demand for secure, confidential computing technologies."

Zama's ongoing research and development efforts will focus on further improving the scalability of its FHE technology, continuing to address obstacles in speed, hardware integration, and developer usability as it positions its protocol for a broader range of financial and computing applications.