Silicon Valley hardware startup Fabric Cryptography has raised $33 million in a Series A funding round to develop a cryptographic processing unit called the Verifiable Processing Unit (VPU).
The Series A funding round was co-led by Blockchain Capital and 1kx, with participation from Offchain Labs, Polygon, and Matter Labs. This round follows a $6 million seed round led by Metaplanet, with participation from Inflection, Liquid2 Ventures, and others.
The funding will allow the team to build the compute chips, software, and cryptographic algorithms needed for the new VPU, which the team describes in a company press release as “a custom silicon chip that uses an instruction set architecture specifically for cryptography.” Scheduled to enter production later this year, the VPU will be able to “significantly improve the speed and cost of running advanced cryptographic workloads” compared to currently available CPUs and GPUs, the team claims.
Fabric Cryptography claims to have already received tens of millions of dollars in pre-orders for its new business unit, while it is also developing a software stack and cloud infrastructure to make the technology more accessible to developers and support growing demand.
“There’s a whole world of advanced cryptographic algorithms that can go beyond just protecting data and actually guarantee trust—if they can be run efficiently. While billions of dollars have been invested in all sorts of better AI chips, cryptography researchers and industry projects have had to make do with CPUs and GPUs that were never built for the intensive math used in advanced cryptography,” said Michael Gao, co-founder and CEO of Fabric Cryptography.
Dr. Wei Dai, a cryptographer and research partner at 1kx, says what sets the VPU apart is its “unique combination of programmability, flexibility and performance,” adding, “Unlike other fixed-function chips that are common in cryptography, the VPU is future-proof, meaning it can adapt to new cryptographic algorithms as they are developed.”
Fabric Cryptography was founded by MIT and Stanford dropouts and AI veterans. The team includes over 50 AI hardware and software engineers and cryptographers from companies like Nvidia, Google, Amazon, Groq, and Cerebras. The team aims to leverage hardware-software co-design techniques found in current AI hardware.
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