Blockchain chip startup Chain Reaction raises $70 million

Business news | February 23, 2023

By Peter Clarke

Blockchain accelerator IC startup Chain Reaction Ltd. (Tel Aviv, Israel) has raised $70 million in a Series C round of equity funding.

At the same time, it said it anticipates the general availability of its first blockchain hardware chips and systems will start in 1Q23.

The company was co-founded by CEO Alon Webman. Webman was a co-founder Mellanox and served with that company for 19 years until shortly before its sale to Nvidia in April 2020.

Chain Reaction, founded in 2019, develops custom ASICs in partnership with cloud computing providers and data centers, to run privacy routines and technologies at high performance and low power. Chain Reaction’s 3PU (Privacy Preserving Processing Unit) is used to accelerate real-time operations privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) on encrypted data.

The Series C will speed up the deployment of enterprise-grade blockchain ASICs and systems, Chain Reaction said. The latest funding brings total raised since formation to $115 million. The company said the money will be used to expand the engineering and development teams, which have grown to 100 full-time employees, including former employees of Nvidia, Mellanox, Israeli Intelligence, and TSMC.

“Enabling real time compute on encrypted data is the holy grail of cloud computing. Chain Reaction is on the cusp of making this a reality by accelerating PETs,” said Alon Webman, co-founder and CEO of Chain Reaction in a statement. “Our technology will enable enterprise and government to modernize compute infrastructure by moving private data to the cloud.”

The Series C was led by Morgan Creek Digital with participation from Hanaco Ventures, Jerusalem Venture Partners, KCK Capital, Exor, Atreides Management and BlueRun Ventures.

Chain Reaction anticipates general availability of its first blockchain hardware chips and systems in the first quarter of 2023.