Belgian startup Belfort has raised a $6m seed investment from Vsquared Ventures, along with Google’s AI chief Jeff Dean and entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant, to build what it says is the world’s first chip for fully encrypted data processing.
Currently whenever you process data — such as when you ask ChatGPT a question or upload a PDF online to a third party tool — it’s available in an unencrypted format.
Belfort is developing a custom chip which makes it possible to process data while it’s encrypted, therefore keeping it secure. “If the data is breached nobody can ever look inside because it stays encrypted,” Belfort cofounder Michiel Van Beirendonck tells Sifted.
“Unlike traditional security that protects data only when it’s resting or in transit, Belfort enables encrypted data to be processed without exposure to servers, cloud providers or middlemen with privileged access,” he says.
That could potentially put an end to the sort of data breaches that can cost governments billions, and allow for the secure processing of healthcare and financial data currently off limits because of regulation.
The company — which owns its intellectual property — spun out of Belgian university KU Leuven’s Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography (COSIC) lab, where cofounders Van Beirendonck and Furkan Turan were researchers. They’re joined by Laurens De Poorter, former crypto VC at Kraken Ventures and deeptech strategist at Google[x], the Big Tech company’s moonshot factory.
The use cases for Belfort's tech
Belfort has already run a proof of concept (PoC) with SWIFT, a messaging network that facilitates international financial transactions. It wanted to test the tech’s ability to analyse encrypted bank transactions going through its network and identify red flags such as those linked to financial crime.
Other use cases include healthcare, where a lot of patient data is locked behind privacy regulations like GDPR. Belfort’s tech could make it possible to process that data securely and use it for things like medical research, finding new vaccines and better personalised patient treatments.
While Belfort hasn’t developed its own physical chip yet, a digital version is currently available on Amazon Web Services (AWS), on which it makes use of programmable chips called FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays). They allow it to programme its own chip architecture onto the cloud provider’s tech, which is scalable depending on the amount of compute a customer needs.
Van Beirendonck says that using FPGAs is the last step before you work towards your own chip tape out — the final stage of the chip design process before it’s sent for manufacturing.
Before Belfort gets to that stage it wants to build up a better understanding of the market and customer needs by running up to four more PoCs with customers in healthcare, finance and government.
The company plans to go to market with a licence fee model and charge customers on a per server basis.
De Poorter says the plan is to fully develop its own chip two to three years from now, but it’ll need “much more money to do that”.
Belfort plans to use part of the funding round to double its team across its Leuven and San Francisco offices in the next two years, with a focus on hiring chip and cryptography experts, as well as people focused on software integration.
Other investors in the round were Anagram, Protocol VC, Inovia Capital, Syndicate One, Prototype and Credibly Neutral.
