Fabric Cryptography raises $33m for VPU chip innovation

A Silicon Valley hardware startup, Fabric Cryptography, has announced the successful closure of a USD $33 million Series A funding round aimed at developing computing chips, software, and cryptographic algorithms.

This funding round, co-led by Blockchain Capital and 1kx, also saw participation from sector leaders such as Offchain Labs, Polygon, and Matter Labs. The new series follows a previous USD $6 million seed round led by Metaplanet, bringing their total funds raised to USD $39 million.

The company, founded by MIT and Stanford dropouts Michael Gao and Tina Ju, along with hardware veterans such as Sagar Reddy, is working to create a new processing unit for cryptography called the Verifiable Processing Unit (VPU). The team comprises AI veterans from prominent companies like Nvidia, Google, Amazon, Meta, Groq, and Cerebras, as well as cryptographers from MIT and KU Leuven.

Michael Gao, Co-Founder and CEO of Fabric Cryptography, highlighted the necessity of such a specialised chip: "There exists 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 researchers and industry projects in cryptography have had to settle with CPUs or GPUs, which were never made for the kind of intensive math that advanced cryptography uses."

The VPU is designed to be the first custom silicon chip that leverages an instruction set architecture specific to cryptography. According to Fabric Cryptography, this new technology is capable of breaking down any cryptographic algorithm into its mathematical building blocks, which are natively accelerated and supported by the chip. The VPU is expected to drastically improve the speed and cost of running advanced cryptographic workloads compared to traditional CPUs, GPUs, and fixed-function cryptography accelerators.

This development comes at a time when cryptographic algorithms are advancing to offer far beyond simple encryption. Algorithms such as Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), Fully-Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), and Multi-Party Computation (MPC) are becoming crucial in providing greater privacy and trust in digital interactions. The VPU aims to make these processes more efficient and scalable.

Dr Wei Dai, cryptographer and research partner at 1kx, commented on the chip's capabilities: "What sets the VPU apart is its unique combination of programmability, flexibility, and performance. The VPU can be programmed to run virtually any cryptographic workload efficiently using its innovative instruction set. Unlike other fixed-function chips, which are common in cryptography, the VPU is future-proof; it can adapt to new cryptography algorithms as they are developed and productionised."

The Series A funding will be used to develop the next generation of the VPU chips and to scale Fabric's software and cryptography teams. The goal is to create additional software and cloud infrastructure to meet the growing market demand. Fabric has already secured tens of millions of dollars in pre-orders for their VPUs from the blockchain space, where ZKPs are becoming integral for scaling decentralised infrastructure.

Yuan Han Li, investor at Blockchain Capital, expressed enthusiasm about the partnership: "We could not be more thrilled to partner with Fabric on their mission to accelerate all cryptographic operations with the world's first VPU to help bring about a world where privacy and verifiability are non-negotiable components of all digital systems."

Looking ahead, Fabric Cryptography aims to build upon its full-stack hardware platform to bring these privacy and trust guarantees to sectors such as AI, finance, medtech, and insurance. The company believes that creating a general-purpose chip that can adapt to any cryptographic algorithm is vital to achieving this goal.