Zama Hits $1 Billion Valuation in Series B, Becomes World’s First FHE Unicorn

Zama, a Paris-based cryptography startup, has raised $57 million (€49 million) in a Series B funding round, pushing its valuation past $1 billion and marking it as the world’s first unicorn in Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE).

The round, co-led by Pantera Capital and Blockchange Ventures, brings Zama’s total funding to over $150 million. This milestone coincides with the announcement of Zama’s Confidential Blockchain Protocol, set to launch its public testnet on July 1, 2025, and its mainnet in the second half of 2025.

"For the past few years, we have been building the most developer friendly, fast and secure Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) scheme, licensing the technology to dozens of companies across blockchain and AI," co-founder Rand Hindi said. “Today, we are unveiling our most ambitious product to date: the Zama Confidential Blockchain Protocol."

Revolutionizing Blockchain with Advanced Confidentiality Features

The Zama Confidential Blockchain Protocol, or simply the Zama Protocol, is a cross-chain confidentiality layer that enables developers to build secure decentralized applications (dApps) on any Layer 1 or Layer 2 blockchain, initially supporting Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) chains with plans to include Solana by 2026.

Compatible with existing languages like Solidity, the protocol supports use cases such as confidential stablecoin issuance, asset tokenization, and network states.

It represents the most advanced confidentiality protocol to date, offering the following key features:

• End-to-end encryption: Transaction inputs and state are fully encrypted, ensuring that no one, including node operators, can access the data.

• Composability: The protocol supports seamless integration between confidential and non-confidential contracts, allowing developers to build on existing contracts, tokens, and dApps.

• Programmable confidentiality: Smart contracts can define specific decryption rules, giving developers full control over who can access what data in their applications.

Since its founding, Zama has improved its FHE technology by 100x, now processing 20 transactions per second, with plans to scale to over 10,000 transactions per second using dedicated hardware like ASIC chips and GPU integration.

Future Implications for Secure Blockchain Applications

The $57 million investment will drive Zama’s mainnet launch, ecosystem adoption, and research to scale FHE-based financial applications to handle hundreds of transactions per second. To ensure accessibility, Zama aims to make its protocol cost-effective for large-scale applications.

“The goal is to make it very cheap for large apps. We’ll publish more on the token soon!” said Dr. Rand Hindi in response to community inquiries.

By addressing long-standing privacy challenges in blockchain, the Zama Protocol positions the company to redefine confidentiality in decentralized finance and cloud computing.

“Zama is commercializing 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.

The Zama Protocol’s impact is already evident in the growing adoption of confidential token transfers, as shown below. The Zama Protocol empowers developers to build scalable, confidential applications that can handle increasing transaction volumes securely.

With its testnet launching on July 1, 2025, and plans to expand to additional blockchains, Zama is set to accelerate the adoption of secure dApps.