Silence Laboratories, a startup building infrastructure using multiparty computation (MPC) to help businesses keep data private and secure, raises $4.1 million in funding round It was announced that.
Pi Ventures and Kira Studio co-led the recent funding with angel investors, bringing the total raised to $6 million. The startup plans to use the funding to expand its team size and strengthen its R&D pipeline.
The startup's infrastructure uses MPC, a subset of cryptography. This allows two or more parties to jointly process confidential or personal information without exposing it to other parties.
Founded in 2021 by Dr. Jay Prakash (CEO), Dr. Andrei Bytes (CTO), and Dr. Tony Quek, Silence is a spinoff of more than a decade of research and development in applied cryptography and application security. The company started as a multi-factor authentication (MFA) company and pivoted its business to building a crypto security company.
“We discovered product market fit (PMF) in privacy-preserving decentralized authentication and computation while talking to early customers who were building digital asset-based products, and since then we have “We have built cryptographic libraries to solve problems associated with our products. Whether they are down or in use, failures can occur and secrets can be exposed,” Prakash explained. did.
Consumer concerns about data privacy are increasing and regulators are tightening data privacy requirements globally. Therefore, large companies have a responsibility to manage the data they collect and protect users' data from the risk of leakage by hackers.
“The way things work today, credit scoring, financial risk analysis and money laundering tracking require data from all sources to be collected and processed in one place,” Prakash said. Stated. “Processing entities are exposed to significant risks and responsibilities that also impede collaboration. Multiple case studies show that ensuring privacy enables richer collaboration and improves data quality. We have found that this improves the quality of the analysis.”
Products and users
The three-year-old company offers two products using MPC technology: Silent Shard and Silent Compute.
Audited by a security auditing firm called Trail of Bits, Silent Shard allows businesses and users to limit the risk of sensitive private keys being exposed and implement advanced authorization rules. We also recently started silent computing. This allows businesses to collaborate and process information without exposing their personal data to third parties, increasing insights while maintaining compliance and trust.
The startup operates on a B2B licensing model, and its library provides a set of features and wrappers for platform- and application-independent packages. Prakash told TechCrunch that target customers include digital asset companies, financial and medical institutions, and telecommunications companies.
Over 20 enterprise customers use Silence's products. The company's customers include BitGo, MetaMask, and his AigenLayer, which recently raised his $100 million from Andreessen Horowitz. The startup's CEO said more collaborations are planned in the future in the areas of finance, money laundry and healthcare.
Silence generates approximately $500,000 in annual recurring revenue. Prakash said the company charges based on the number of accounts it protects and the features it supports.
“Pricing is determined by what category the customer is: large enterprises with niche capabilities, mid-sized enterprises, or early-stage enterprises that need early support,” Prakash said.
Many large cryptocurrency companies have integrated multiparty computation (MPC) capabilities into their services through acquisitions over the past two years. In November 2021, Coinbase acquired Unbound Security, a cryptocurrency storage infrastructure company specializing in MPC. Blockdaemon acquired Sepior, a digital asset security company that provides key management services for institutional investors, in his July 2022 acquisition. The market size for privacy-enhancing technologies (such as MPC) is projected to reach a valuation of $25.8 billion by 2033, an increase of 26.6% from USD. 2.4 billion people in 2023.
“With deep cryptographic expertise, [The Silence team] is working on a series of breakthrough products in privacy and authentication infrastructure,” said Founding Partner of Kira Studio and former co-founder of Polygon Anurag Arjun. “Combining privacy-preserving infrastructure with blockchain and fintech rails is going to be huge.”