Fabric, Startup Building 'VPU' Chips for Cryptography, Raises $33M

Fabric Cryptography, a startup focused on hardware, has raised $33 million in a Series A fundraising round co-led by Blockchain Capital and 1kx.

Other participating investors included Offchain Labs, Polygon and Matter Labs. The project previously had raised $6 million in a seed round led by Metaplanet. Fabric was founded by MIT and Stanford dropouts Michael Gao and Tina Ju, along with hardware veterans such as Sagar Reddy, according to a press release.

The fresh funds will be used to "build computing chips, software and cryptographic algorithms," the company said.

At the heart of Fabric's roadmap is a new processing unit known as the "verifiable processing unit," or VPU, which will be tailored to handle cryptography, according to the project.

Companies are developing new computing chips to handle rising use from AI – with its heavy demand for fast computation from graphics processing units, or GPUs – as well as cryptography-intensive blockchain applications.

Fabric said in the press release that the VPU is "the first custom silicon chip that uses an instruction set architecture specific to cryptography," which means that "any cryptographic algorithm can be broken down into its mathematical building blocks that are natively accelerated and supported by the chip."

The new chips are slated to go into production later this year, Fabric said.

The VPUs are "poised to drastically improve the speed and cost of running advanced cryptographic workloads, compared to CPUs, GPUs and fixed-function cryptography," according to the press release. They "will do for cryptography what Nvidia’s GPUs and many other startups’ chips are doing for AI."