Niobium Raises $23 Million for FHE Hardware Acceleration

The startup will invest the funds in accelerating development of its second-generation fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) platforms.

Niobium on Wednesday announced raising $23 million in an oversubscribed funding round that brings the total raised by the company to over $28 million.

Founded in 2021, Dayton, Ohio-based Niobium is providing a hardware accelerator purpose-built for fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) that guarantees data privacy.

The startup’s custom PCIe card accelerates the performance of FHE software, enabling computing on encrypted data and tackling the risks posed by the emergence of quantum computing to existing encryption standards.

Niobium says its hardware accelerator comes with support for all major FHE schemes and can be easily inserted into any server for fast integration with existing workflows.

According to the company, its solution makes zero-trust computing (ZTC) feasible by supporting high-performance encrypted data processing.

The funding came from new investors Blockchange Ventures, ADVentures, Korea Development Bank ...