Fabric Cryptography raises US$33 million for security chips
Fabric Cryptography Inc. (San Francisco, Calif.) is a 2023 startup that has raised US$33 million in a Series A round aimed at building security chips.
The company, founded by MIT and Stanford dropouts Michael Gao (pictured) and Tina Ju, is about to bring out its first Verifiable Processing Unit (VPU) later in 2024 but said the Series A would be used to fund the development of the next generation of Fabric’s VPU chips and the scaling of Fabric’s software and cryptography teams.
The VPU is a programmable chip built to accelerate cryptography such as zero-knowledge proofs and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE).
The funding round was co-led by Blockchain Capital and 1kx, with participation from other funds such as Offchain Labs, Polygon, and Matter Labs. It follows a US$6 million seed round in July 2023.Thus total funds raised stand at US$39 million. The company claims to have an order book worth more than US$60 million.
Fabric Cryptography claims that its VPU will be the first custom silicon chip that uses an instruction set architecture specific to cryptography. This means it should perform cryptography calculations more efficiently than more general-purpose processors or processors designed for other functions – such as graphics, the company said The VPU is due to go into mass production later in 2024.
Fabric Cryptography is building the VPU at a time when rapid progress is being made in algorithms that enable dataset proofs while keeping the data itself private – so called Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), and FHE.
“Our mission is to scale the speed and availability of next-gen cryptography through exponential advances across the hardware and software stack. We’ll know we’ve succeeded when trust and privacy are foundational to every digital interaction,” said Gao, in a statement. Fabric has found a first market for advanced cryptography in the blockchain space, where ZKPs are promising for the scaling of decentralized infrastructure.
“What sets the VPU apart is its unique combination of programmability, flexibility, and performance,” said Wei Dai, research partner at 1kx, in the same statement. “The VPU can be programmed to run virtually any cryptographic workload efficiently using its innovative instruction set.”
Fabric has amassed a team of over 50 AI hardware and software engineers from such companies such as Nvidia, Google, Amazon, Groq, and Cerebras.
FHE-optimized computation is already being pursued by such companies as Chain Reaction Ltd.
Niobium Microsystems Inc.
and Cornami Inc.
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