Niobium, a start-up based in Dayton, Ohio, announced $5.5 million in seed fundraising for its development of a fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) hardware accelerator for Zero Trust cryptography hardware.
Niobium is a spin-out from Galois, a consultant group leading advanced cryptography and privacy research and development. The company'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.
https://niobiummicrosystems.com
