Fabric Cryptography Secures $33 Million Series A Funding

Silicon Valley hardware startup Fabric Cryptography has announced a $33 million Series A funding round to develop its innovative cryptography processing unit, the Verifiable Processing Unit (VPU).

The funding was co-led by Blockchain Capital and 1kx, with contributions from Offchain Labs, Polygon, and Matter Labs, following a previous $6 million seed round from Metaplanet, Inflection, and Liquid2 Ventures.

This investment will support the development of the necessary computing chips, software, and cryptographic algorithms for the VPU, described as a “custom silicon chip with a specific instruction set architecture for cryptography,” according to the company’s press release. Set for production later this year, the VPU aims to significantly enhance the speed and cost-effectiveness of running complex cryptographic workloads, outperforming existing CPUs and GPUs.

Fabric Cryptography reports having received tens of millions of dollars in pre-orders and is also creating a software stack and cloud infrastructure to increase accessibility for developers and meet rising demand.

Michael Gao, co-founder and CEO, emphasizes the potential of advanced cryptographic algorithms to guarantee trust and efficiency, contrasting the focus on AI chip development with the limitations of current CPUs and GPUs in handling complex cryptography.

Dr. Wei Dai, a cryptographer at 1kx, highlights the VPU’s programmability, flexibility, and performance, marking it as future-proof against the evolving landscape of cryptographic algorithms.

Founded by MIT and Stanford dropouts and seasoned AI professionals, Fabric Cryptography has a team of over 50 AI hardware engineers and cryptographers from top tech companies like Nvidia, Google, Amazon, Groq, and Cerebras, employing hardware-software co-design techniques reminiscent of AI hardware development.