TLDR:
– Niobium, a custom silicon provider, has closed a $5.5 million seed funding round led by Fusion Fund.
– The funding will be used to commercialize FHE accelerator chip technology for various applications.
Niobium, a leading custom silicon provider, recently completed a $5.5 million seed funding round led by Fusion Fund, a venture capital firm known for supporting technology companies that leverage data advantages. The funding round also included notable investors like Morgan Creek Capital, Rev1 Ventures, Ohio Innovation Fund, and Hale Capital.
The company plans to utilize the funding to develop commercial applications for Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) acceleration in sectors such as healthcare, pharmaceutical research, financial fraud detection, blockchain public ledgers, and digital advertising. Additionally, Niobium intends to expand its software engineering team, enhance its intellectual property protection, and optimize its FHE hardware products.
Niobium is focused on revolutionizing Zero-Trust Computing with its cryptographic hardware solutions, particularly its FHE accelerator chip. This technology allows computing on encrypted data, guaranteeing mathematical data privacy. The company, which spun out of Galois, has a team of cryptography experts and chip designers working to bring its FHE accelerator chip to market.
One of the key products in Niobium’s portfolio is a PCIe card based on its FHE System on a Chip (SoC), designed to accelerate the performance of FHE software solutions by up to four orders of magnitude in existing cloud servers. This ensures data privacy and confidentiality during processing, eliminating the risk of encrypted data theft.
The company plans to showcase this solution to customers and commence pilots in Q4 2024, marking a significant milestone towards its growth and development. Niobium’s work is seen as groundbreaking in the data privacy and security space, with investors and partners expressing confidence in the potential of its technology to shape the future of secure computing.
