Belfort Labs

Founded in 2025, Belfort is a spin-off from the world-renowned COSIC (Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography) lab at KU Leuven in Belgium. The company was co-founded by CEO Michiel Van Beirendonck, Furkan Turan, Laurens De Poorter, and Professor Ingrid Verbauwhede. Van Beirendonck, the principal architect of the hardware platform, focused his PhD at KU Leuven on accelerating FHE and contributed to DARPA's DPRIVE program. Turan and Van Beirendonck developed the foundational technical breakthroughs at COSIC. De Poorter has a background as a crypto VC at Kraken Ventures and deeptech strategist at Google, while Verbauwhede is a global authority in cryptographic hardware. The core research matured over several years, supported by grants from the European Research Council and participation in a U.S. government contract with DARPA.

In September 2025, Belfort announced a $6 million seed funding round led by deep-tech specialist Vsquared Ventures. The round included participation from Anagram, Protocol VC, Inovia Capital, and notable angel investors like Jeff Dean (Google's Chief Scientist) and Naval Ravikant. The company operates with offices in San Francisco, USA, and Leuven, Belgium. Belfort's business model centers on making its hardware accelerator accessible through the AWS Marketplace as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), allowing for seamless integration. This enables clients in high-stakes sectors such as healthcare, finance, government, and blockchain to perform complex operations like AI analytics, fraud detection, and genomic analysis while maintaining data confidentiality. The accelerator is designed to speed up the open-source TFHE-rs library, offering significant performance improvements over CPU and GPU-based solutions.