French cryptography start-up Zama has raised $57 million in Series B financing co-led by Pantera Capital and Blockchange Ventures, lifting the Paris-based firm’s valuation past $1 billion and making it the first company focused on fully homomorphic encryption to reach unicorn status. The round brings Zama’s total funding to more than $150 million. Proceeds will support the roll-out of the company’s Confidential Blockchain Protocol, whose public testnet went live alongside the funding announcement, enabling developers to build encrypted smart contracts and confidential decentralised applications on public chains. Zama said it will debut the protocol on Ethereum in July before expanding to other EVM-compatible networks and Solana. The firm claims its FHE technology is already 100 times faster than at launch and is working on dedicated hardware to lift throughput to thousands of transactions per second, targeting use cases ranging from privacy-preserving payments to on-chain identity.