DAYTON,
Ohio, May 7, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Niobium today
announced the completion of a $5.5
million seed fundraising round, marking a substantial step
towards its future growth and development. This achievement is
accompanied by the expansion of its Board of Directors, further
strengthening the company's leadership and strategic
capabilities.
Niobium, a leading custom silicon provider, is revolutionizing
the field of Zero Trust Computing with its innovative cryptography
hardware. A fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) hardware accelerator
is at the forefront of its product portfolio. This cutting-edge
technology allows for computing on encrypted data, providing a
mathematical guarantee of data privacy. Niobium's purpose-built
hardware acceleration for FHE is performance-led for the fastest
FHE acceleration, unlocking new possibilities for the data
economy.
Niobium is a spin-out from Galois, a consultant group leading
advanced cryptography and privacy research and development. The
Niobium founders built a dedicated team of the world's most
advanced cryptography experts and world-class chip designers to
bring its FHE accelerator chip to market. Over the past two
years, Niobium has received significant non-dilutive capital
through federal programs focused on the development of the first
dedicated hardware capable of advancing FHE into commercial
applications.
Niobium's fully integrated custom silicon for FHE is a PCIe card
based on Niobium's FHE System on a Chip (SoC) that can be inserted
into any existing cloud server to accelerate the performance of FHE
software solutions by up to four orders of magnitude while keeping
data completely private and confidential and eliminating the
possibility that encrypted data could be stolen at the moment of
processing. The company will demonstrate the solution for customers
and begin pilots starting in Q4 2024.
Niobium will leverage this new funding to develop commercial
applications for FHE acceleration, including healthcare and
pharmaceutical research, financial fraud detection,
blockchain public ledgers, digital advertising, and other use cases
where sharing and analyzing data while maintaining complete privacy
is paramount. Niobium also plans to grow its software engineering
team, expand existing IP protection, and continue to optimize its
FHE hardware products.
Niobium will open its Early Access Program (NEAP) in late
Q2 2024 to interested companies. The program will have limited
availability. If your company is interested in an invitation to
join, please visit https://niobiummicro.com/ to learn more.
"Securing this financing validates the groundbreaking work we're
doing at Niobium and propels us into the next critical phase of
bringing our FHE accelerator chip to market. Our vision of
redefining data privacy and security through advanced cryptography
is now closer to reality. This investment enables us to fast-track
the exploration of applications that require absolute data privacy,
opening new possibilities for confidential computing across various
industries. We are thankful to our investors for sharing our vision
of a more secure and private digital future," said Kevin Yoder, president and CEO of Niobium.
The funding was led by Fusion Fund, a venture capital firm known
for backing technology companies that leverage data advantages. As
part of this funding, Niobium welcomed new board member
Shane Wall, Fusion Fund partner and
president of CXO Network, former CTO of Hewlett Packard, and Global
Head of HP Labs. Notable investors including Morgan Creek Capital,
Rev1 Ventures, Ohio Innovation Fund and Hale Capital, also
contributed.
"I am thrilled to join the board of Niobium, a company that
stands at the forefront of privacy technology with the world's
first FHE accelerator chip. The potential of computing encrypted
data without compromising an individual's privacy is immense, and
Niobium is leading the charge in making this a practical reality
for businesses worldwide. Fusion Fund is proud to support Niobium's
journey towards commercializing their technology, which we believe
will play a crucial role in shaping the future of secure
computing," said Shane Wall,
Niobium's Chairman and Fusion Fund partner.
About Niobium:
Niobium is blazing a new path for the
data economy by developing custom hardware solutions for Zero Trust
Computing. Niobium is pioneering the first dedicated hardware
capable of advancing fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) into
commercial applications. This technology keeps data encrypted even
during computing, enabling a new class of multi-party machine
learning and statistical analysis applications with mathematically
guaranteed privacy. Niobium is headquartered in Dayton, Ohio, and has offices in Columbus, Ohio, Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco, California. More information is
available at niobiummicro.com.
Contact: Caster Communications, Inc. at 401.792.708 or
377265@email4pr.com
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SOURCE Niobium