Fabric Cryptography Raises $33M for High-Performance Cryptography Chip – News Analysis

August 19, 2024: Silicon Valley hardware startup Fabric Cryptography announced a $33 million Series A funding round to build cryptographic chips, software, and algorithms.

The round was co-led by Blockchain Capital and 1kx, with participation from other players in the sector such as Offchain Labs, Polygon, and Matter Labs. It follows a $6 million seed round led by Metaplanet with participation from Inflection and Liquid2 Ventures, among others. The total amount raised is $39 million.

The team, founded by MIT and Stanford graduates Michael Gao and Tina Ju, as well as hardware veterans like Sagar Reddy, aims to leverage cutting-edge hardware-software co-design techniques currently found in AI hardware to build an entirely new cryptography processing unit they’re calling a Verifiable Processing Unit (VPU). It would work for cryptography the way Nvidia’s GPUs and many other startup chips work for AI.

Fabric Cryptography co-founder and CEO Michael Gao said, “There’s 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 cryptography researchers and industry projects have had to settle for CPUs or GPUs, which were never built for the intensive math that advanced cryptography uses.”

The VPU is the first custom silicon chip to use a cryptography-specific instruction set architecture. This means that any cryptographic algorithm can be broken down into its mathematical building blocks, which are natively accelerated and supported by the chip. The VPU, which will enter production later this year, is poised to dramatically improve the speed and cost of running advanced cryptographic workloads compared to CPUs, GPUs, and fixed-function cryptographic accelerators.

Fabric Cryptography builds VPUs at a time when cryptographic algorithms can provide guarantees that are much more meaningful than simple encryption. Rapid progress is being made in algorithms that allow anyone to prove facts about a set of data while preserving the privacy of the data itself, such as zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP), algorithms that enable secure computation on private data, such as fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), and algorithms that can enable two parties that do not fully trust each other to cooperate, such as multi-party computation (MPC).

Gao added, “Empowering cryptographers’ most ambitious ideas is at the heart of Fabric’s mission, because of the power these ideas can have anywhere we interact with the digital world. Our mission is to scale the speed and accessibility of next-generation cryptography by exponential advancement across the hardware and software stack. We’ll know we’ve succeeded when trust and privacy are at the core of every digital interaction.”

Fabric has found its first market for advanced cryptography in the blockchain space, where ZKPs are a key solution for scaling decentralized infrastructure. For this application, Fabric has already received tens of millions of dollars in pre-orders for its VPUs. Fabric is also building a software stack that makes this new technology available to software developers, as well as several other algorithms that can keep your personal data private when running AI models in the cloud.

“What sets the VPU apart is its unique combination of programmability, flexibility, and performance,” said Dr. Wei Dai, cryptographer and research partner at 1kx. “The VPU can be programmed to efficiently handle virtually any cryptographic workload using its innovative instruction set. Unlike other fixed-function circuits that are common in cryptography, the VPU is future-proof—it can adapt to new cryptographic algorithms as they are developed and produced.”

The Series A funding will fund the development of Fabric’s next-generation VPUs and will expand Fabric’s software and cryptography teams to develop additional software and cloud infrastructure to meet growing market demand.

“We couldn’t be more excited to partner with Fabric on their mission to accelerate all crypto operations with the world’s first VPU to help create a world where privacy and auditability are non-negotiable parts of all digital systems,” said Yuan Han Li, investor at Blockchain Capital.

In the future, Fabric Cryptography wants to develop its full stack hardware platform to bring these transformative privacy and trust guarantees to AI, finance, health tech, insurance, and more. They believe that creating a universal chip that can adapt to any cryptographic algorithm is key to achieving this goal.