Zama is an open-source cryptography company that develops tools for Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE). The company's mission is to make FHE accessible to developers, enabling the creation of applications that can process data on untrusted domains without decryption. Zama's technology primarily focuses on bringing confidentiality to blockchain and artificial intelligence applications. Its main products include the fhEVM for creating confidential smart contracts and the Concrete library, its foundational FHE toolkit. ^{[1] [2]}​

History

Zama was founded in 2020 by Dr. Pascal Paillier, a cryptographer known for the Paillier cryptosystem, and Dr. Rand Hindi, an entrepreneur and expert in artificial intelligence. The company was established to advance the practical application of Fully Homomorphic Encryption. ^{[1] [2]}​

After an initial seed funding round, Zama announced a $73 million Series A funding round in March 2024. The round was co-led by Multicoin Capital and Protocol Labs, with participation from investors including Metaplanet, Blockchange Ventures, Vsquared Ventures, and Stake Capital. ^{[1] [2]}​

On July 1, 2025, after five years of development, the company announced the launch of the Zama Confidential Blockchain Protocol and the release of its public testnet. In October 2025, Zama began announcing the genesis operators for its protocol, which included infrastructure providers such as Figment, Conduit, and InfStones. ^[2]​

Core Technology: Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE)

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is an advanced cryptographic method that allows for arbitrary computations to be performed directly on encrypted data. Often considered a "holy grail" of cryptography, FHE enables a third-party server to process encrypted data and produce an encrypted result. When the user decrypts this result, it is identical to the output that would have been achieved by performing the same computations on the original, unencrypted data. Throughout this process, the server or any other external party never gains access to the plaintext data, ensuring complete privacy and confidentiality. ^{[1] [2]}

Zama's implementation of FHE is packaged in its open-source library suite, Concrete. This toolkit is designed to abstract away the complexities of FHE, providing developers with a more accessible and performant way to build privacy-preserving applications. Concrete serves as the foundational cryptographic layer for all of Zama's products. The suite includes components such as TFHE-rs, a Rust implementation of the TFHE (Fully Homomorphic Encryption over the Torus) scheme, which is optimized for performance and security. ^[1]

Products and Solutions

Zama's product stack is built on top of its core Concrete library, offering solutions for both blockchain and artificial intelligence. ^[1]​

fhEVM (Fully Homomorphic EVM)

The fhEVM is Zama's solution for integrating confidentiality into Ethereum and other EVM-compatible blockchains. It extends the Ethereum Virtual Machine to allow smart contracts to operate on encrypted data inputs and manage encrypted states. Developers can write smart contracts in Solidity using special encrypted data types, such as euint, to designate which parts of a contract's logic or state should remain confidential. ^[1]​

The system is designed to keep gas fees low by using a coprocessor model that offloads the intensive FHE computations from the main chain. This allows the network to process and verify transactions involving encrypted data without sacrificing scalability. Projects such as Fhenix and Inco are among the first to build blockchains utilizing Zama's fhEVM technology. ^[1]​

Zama Confidential Blockchain Protocol

The Zama Confidential Blockchain Protocol is the company's official implementation of its confidential blockchain solution, powered by the fhEVM. The protocol, which launched its public testnet in July 2025, utilizes a Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) consensus mechanism. The network is run by a set of 18 initial genesis operators, which include Key Management Service (KMS) nodes and FHE Coprocessors. Announced operators include Figment, Conduit, and InfStones. ^[2]​

Concrete ML

Concrete ML is a toolset that facilitates the conversion of machine learning models into their FHE equivalents. It allows developers to compile models from standard frameworks like PyTorch and scikit-learn into a privacy-preserving format. This enables AI applications to perform predictions on encrypted user data. A user can send their sensitive data in an encrypted format to a service running a Concrete ML model, and the service can return an encrypted prediction without ever accessing the underlying plaintext information. This capability is particularly relevant for regulated industries such as healthcare and finance. ^[1]​

Concrete Library

The Concrete library is the core, open-source cryptographic engine that underpins all of Zama's products. It provides the low-level cryptographic primitives and FHE schemes necessary for building custom privacy-preserving applications. It is designed for performance and security, serving as the foundation of the Zama ecosystem. ^{[1] [2]}​

Use Cases

Confidential Blockchain

Zama's technology addresses the inherent transparency of public blockchains, where all transaction data and smart contract states are publicly visible. By enabling on-chain confidentiality, Zama unlocks use cases that require privacy.

• Confidential DeFi: Applications such as private token swaps, confidential lending protocols, and front-running-resistant order books where user balances and transaction amounts are hidden.
• Private On-Chain Voting: Encrypted voting systems for Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) that prevent voter coercion and protect voter privacy.
• Blind Auctions: Sealed-bid auctions where bids remain confidential until the auction concludes, ensuring fairness.
• On-Chain Gaming: Games that incorporate hidden information, such as private card hands in a poker game or secret character attributes.

Andrew Huang, CEO of Conduit, commented on the technology's potential, stating, "Financial institutions and Web2 firms need privacy to move onchain. Zama's tech makes it possible." ^[2]​

Privacy-Preserving AI

In the field of artificial intelligence, Zama's tools allow services to leverage sensitive user data without compromising privacy. This is critical in sectors with strict data protection regulations.

• Healthcare: Analyzing encrypted patient data for medical diagnostics while maintaining compliance with regulations like HIPAA.
• Finance: Building credit scoring or fraud detection models using personal financial information without exposing the raw data.
• Cloud Services: Offering confidential cloud computing where the provider can process a user's data without having access to it. ^[1]

Funding and Investors

In March 2024, Zama announced that it had raised $73 million in a Series A funding round. The round was co-led by Multicoin Capital and Protocol Labs. Other participating investors included Metaplanet, Blockchange Ventures, Vsquared Ventures, and Stake Capital. ^{[1] [2]}​

In June 2025, Zama announced a $57 million Series B funding round co-led by two leading U.S.-based investment firms Blockchange Ventures and Pantera Capital​, bringing Zama’s total funding to over $150 million, and its valuation to north of a billion USD. The new funding is to support Zama’s mainnet launch, ecosystem adoption, and research efforts to make financial applications built with FHE scale to thousands of transactions per second. ^[3]​

Founders

Dr. Pascal Paillier

Dr. Pascal Paillier is the co-founder and President of Zama. He is a renowned cryptographer with over two decades of experience in hardware security and cryptography. He is best known as the inventor of the Paillier cryptosystem (1999), a widely used partial homomorphic encryption scheme that forms the basis for many privacy-preserving technologies. ^{[1] [2]}​

Dr. Rand Hindi

Dr. Rand Hindi is the co-founder and CEO of Zama. He is a serial entrepreneur and an expert in AI. Before co-founding Zama, he founded Snips, an AI voice platform that was acquired by Sonos. He holds a Ph.D. in Bioinformatics from University College London. On the role of FHE in blockchain, Hindi has stated, "FHE is the only technology that offers security + verifiability + composability. It simply adds a layer of confidentiality to existing chains." ^{[1] [2]}​