Fabric Cryptography, a Silicon Valley startup focused on enhancing privacy in the digital ecosystem, has secured $33 million in funding co-led by Blockchain Capital and 1kx.

According to a press release, Fabric Cryptography stated that the funding will allow it to focus on the next generation of cryptography. The company aims to promote real-world adoption of privacy guarantees, leveraging new technology to enhance encryption and authentication.

To achieve this, Fabric taps into artificial intelligence for its Verifiable Processing Unit (VPU). The startup claims that the VPU is an AI chip designed to give cryptography advanced features, similar to how Nvidia’s chips are impacting the AI industry. Fabric’s VPU is positioned as the equivalent of AI-powered graphic processing units currently driving the AI revolution.

The funding will help bring this new chip to reality, adding ‘mathematical trust’ to the privacy and big data market. The startup, co-founded by MIT and Stanford dropouts Michael Gao and Tina Ju, also received backing from Polygon, Offchain Labs, and Matter Labs.

“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.”

Apart from funding the production of its new chip, Fabric plans to use the financing to scale its software and cryptography teams as well as its cloud infrastructure.

The $33 million funding round follows the $6 million raised in a seed round. Fabric has now raised a total of $39 million, with the earlier round led by Metaplanet.

When does VPU go into production?

Fabric expects to have its silicon chip go into production later this year. Once deployed, the chip will offer greater speed compared to core processing units, GPUs, and fixed-function cryptography accelerators.

The VPU is designed to complement and improve cryptographic algorithms that currently offer more privacy guarantees, including zero-knowledge proofs, fully-homomorphic encryption, and multi-party computation. Notably, these are issues that privacy-focused cryptocurrencies like Zcash target for user adoption.

However, experts worry that surveillance hardware is likely to undermine crypto’s strides in privacy and data protection.

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