Fabric Cryptography

Fabric Cryptography, Inc. is a Silicon Valley-based hardware company founded in 2022 by the husband-and-wife team of Michael Gao and Tina Ju, both MIT and Stanford dropouts, along with hardware veterans Sagar Reddy and David Garrett. Gao, the CEO, previously co-founded AI photonics company Luminous Computing and a Bitcoin mining chip firm called Katana, which was later rebranded as Fabric Systems. This background in ambitious hardware ventures underpins Fabric's mission to address the performance limitations of advanced cryptographic methods.

The company is developing a new class of processor, the Verifiable Processing Unit (VPU), designed specifically to accelerate cryptographic computations. This custom silicon chip features an instruction set architecture tailored for the mathematical building blocks of cryptographic algorithms, aiming to provide the performance of an ASIC with the programmability of a GPU. The goal is to make computationally intensive techniques like Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) and Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) practical for widespread use. These technologies allow for proving information without revealing underlying data and computing on encrypted data, respectively, addressing a critical tension between data utilization and privacy.

Fabric's business model centers on selling its VPU hardware and a supporting software stack, including an LLVM-based compiler, to make the technology accessible to developers. The company's initial target market is the blockchain sector, where ZKPs are crucial for scaling decentralized infrastructure; Fabric has already secured tens of millions of dollars in pre-orders for this application. Long-term, the company plans to expand into enterprise data centers and serve industries such as finance, medtech, AI, and insurance by enabling new standards of trust and privacy. The company has raised a total of $39 million through a $6 million seed round and a $33 million Series A round co-led by Blockchain Capital and 1kx, with participation from firms like Offchain Labs, Polygon, and Matter Labs.

Keywords: Verifiable Processing Unit, VPU, cryptographic hardware, Zero-Knowledge Proofs, ZKP, Fully Homomorphic Encryption, FHE, custom silicon, hardware acceleration, blockchain infrastructure, data privacy, secure computation, Michael Gao, Tina Ju, hardware-software codesign, cryptography accelerator, programmable chip, decentralized infrastructure, enterprise security, fintech, medtech