Cornami raises $68 million to provide quantum encryption solution
On May 17, fabless semiconductor company Cornami announced that its oversubscribed Series C round of financing had closed $68 million, led by SoftBank Vision 2 Fund. The round included significant participation from Impact Venture Capital and Octave Ventures, as well as support from existing investors and insiders, as well as a previously announced strategic investment from Applied Ventures, LLC[1]. The financing will be used primarily for quantum cryptography research.
The TruStream® computing fabric architecture developed by Cornami can scale performance with no penalties, providing real-time computing for some critical and complex applications. The company's unique technology reduces software power consumption and latency while scaling performance for today's processing of massive data sets. This includes the most noteworthy technology at the moment: Accelerated Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), a quantum-safe privacy-preserving computation for encrypted datasets, critical to cloud security. Cornami aims to accelerate the race to achieve FHE by providing a high-performance computing solution that makes post-quantum encryption work more efficiently.
FHE provides the authority to perform arbitrary operations on encrypted data, providing an appropriate solution to one of the largest and most challenging security vulnerabilities in cloud computing today - data decryption in use. FHE eliminates this costly breach and cybercrime risk because the underlying confidential plaintext data can remain encrypted.
Today, the Internet-driven economy continues to generate ever-increasing amounts of data. We live in an era of data intelligence with machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI). The ability to share/monetize these models without revealing confidential data creates significant advancements in intelligent insights, enabling enormous opportunities in highly regulated markets. For example, multi-party research in medicine benefits from massive pooled patient data, which in turn accelerates breakthrough treatments; cross-border data sharing between financial institutions enables real-time fraud detection. This all provides extraordinary value while protecting data privacy.
The challenge of FHE deployment to date has been that it is computationally intensive and therefore impractical to implement on conventional processors. Cornami changes this paradigm by processing these encrypted datasets in real-time at market prices based on its unique, scalable computing architecture.
Cornami's CEO, Dr. Walden (Wally) Rhines, believes that Cornami's flexibility and its ability to "adjust its computing structure to meet specific customer requirements" is what differentiates it from these larger vendors[2].
In addition to this, Dr Rhines said: "The advent of practical FHE has changed the game in the cloud computing market and the entire information processing industry. Today, we cannot guarantee hacker-proof firewalls, secure operating systems, processing without embedded Trojans It is also impossible to guarantee the internal risk of employees in computing environments. With FHE, privacy and data security, widely accessible services become achievable goals, while maintaining complete confidentiality of data, applications and service results.”
"We believe the age of intelligence is being driven by the ability to efficiently extract knowledge and insight from data," said Dr. Eric Chen, managing partner of SoftBank Investment Advisors. "Cornami's unique scalable computing architecture is designed to provide real-time fully homomorphic encryption, which can fundamentally enhance capabilities across industries, driving economic growth, scientific discovery and innovation. We look forward to working with Dr. Rhines and the Cornami team to enable become a reality.”
Jack Crawford, Founding Partner of Impact Venture Capital, said: "Cornami's technology is uniquely capable of meeting today's real-time, high-performance computing requirements while also providing programming flexibility for large growth markets such as cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and cloud computing. The Cornami management team has successfully brought new technologies to market several times over their careers. As an early investor in Cornami, we are excited to continue investing alongside investors such as SoftBank, Octave Ventures and Applied Ventures.”
About Cornami
Cornami focuses on deploying intelligent computing in real-world scenarios. The company has developed a massively parallel and reconfigurable computing fabric architecture to address the computational demands of today and tomorrow's ever-increasing massive datasets. Its TruStream® technology provides unprecedented linear scalability: from thousands of cores on a single chip to millions of cores across a system, it can meet the performance, cost and power requirements of today's complex applications.
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[2]https://venturebeat.com/2022/05/17/cornami-quantum-encryption/
