Niobium, a Dayton, OH-based custom silicon provider, raised $5.5M in Seed funding.
The round was led by Fusion Fund. Morgan Creek Capital, Rev1 Ventures, Ohio Innovation Fund and Hale Capital, also participated. As part of this funding, Niobium added new board member Shane Wall, Fusion Fund partner and president of CXO Network, former CTO of Hewlett Packard, and Global Head of HP Labs.
The company intends to use the funds 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.
Led by CEO and President Kevin Yoder, Niobium develops custom hardware solutions for zero trust computing and offers 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.
The company has offices in Columbus, Ohio, Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco, California.
Commenting on the news, Kevin Yoder said: “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.”
FinSMEs
07/05/2024