Fabric Cryptography to develop cryptography processing unit after raising $33 million

Silicon Valley hardware startup Fabric Cryptography raised $33 million in a Series A funding round to develop a cryptography processing unit, which it calls 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 among others. The round comes after a $6 million seed round led by Metaplanet, with participation from Inflection, Liquid2 Ventures and others.

The funding will enable the team to build the computing chips, software and cryptographic algorithms required for the new VPU, which the team describes as a “custom silicon chip that uses an instruction set architecture specific to cryptography,” according to a company press release. The VPU, set to go into production later this year, will be able to “drastically 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 unit and is concurrently developing a software stack and cloud infrastructure to make the tech more accessible for developers and support growing demand.

“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,” said Fabric Cryptography’s co-founder and CEO Michael Gao.

Dr Wei Dai, a cryptographer and research partner at 1kx, stated that what sets the VPU apart is its “unique combination of programmability, flexibility, and performance,” adding that “unlike other fixed-function chips, which are common in cryptography, the VPU is future-proof — it can adapt to new cryptography algorithms as they are developed.”

Fabric Cryptography was founded by MIT and Stanford dropouts and AI veterans. Its team includes over 50 AI hardware and software engineers and cryptographers from companies such as Nvidia, Google, Amazon, Groq, and Cerebras. The team aims to utilize hardware-software codesign techniques currently found in AI hardware.