Silence Laboratories, a startup that builds infrastructure using multi-party computing (MPC) to help businesses maintain data privacy and security, said it has raised a $4.1 million funding round.
Pi Ventures and Kira Studio co-led the recent funding, which brings the total raised to $6 million, alongside angel investors. The startup will use this funding to develop its teams and strengthen its R&D pipeline.
The startup’s infrastructure uses MPC, a subset of cryptography, which allows two or more parties to collaborate on processing without exposing sensitive and private information to other engaged parties.
Founded in 2021 by Dr. Jay Prakash (CEO), Dr. Andrei Bytes (CTO), and Dr. Tony Quek, Silence is the result of over a decade of R&D in applied cryptography and application security. The company started as a multi-factor authentication (MFA) company and pivoted its business toward building a crypto security company.
“We found product-market fit (PMF) in privacy-preserving decentralized authorization and computation by talking to early customers who were developing digital asset-based products and since then we have built crypto libraries to solve the relevant problem of one. point of failure and exposure of secrets, whether at rest or in use,” Prakash explained.
Consumer concerns about data privacy are increasing and regulators around the world are strengthening data privacy requirements. It is for this reason that large companies are responsible for managing the data they collect and protecting user data from the risk of it being leaked by hackers.
“Credit scoring, financial risk analysis or money laundering tracking, as they work today, require data from all sources to be stored in one place and then processed,” said Prakash. “The processing entity is exposed to enormous risks and liabilities, which also deters collaborations. It has been found in several case studies that if confidentiality can be guaranteed, richer collaborations are possible, which would improve data quality and therefore analysis.
Products and users
The three-year-old company offers two products using MPC technology: Silent Shard and Silent Compute.
Silent Shard, audited by a security auditing company called Trail of Bits, allows businesses and users to limit the risk of exposing sensitive private keys and implements advanced authorization rules. The company also recently launched Silent Compute, which allows businesses to collaborate on information processing without revealing their own private data to third parties and enrich insights while maintaining compliance and trust.
The startup operates in a B2B licensing model in which its libraries offer a suite of features and wrappers for the platform and application agnostic package. Prakash told TechCrunch that its target customers include digital asset companies, financial and healthcare organizations, and telecommunications companies.
More than 20 corporate clients use Silence products. Its clients include BitGo, MetaMask and EigenLayer, which recently raised $100 million from Andreessen Horowitz. The startup’s CEO noted that more partnerships – in the finance, anti-money laundering and healthcare sectors – were coming.
Silence generates approximately $500,000 in annual recurring revenue. The company charges based on the number of accounts it protects and the features it supports, Prakash noted.
“Price depends on the category of customers: large enterprises with niche features, mid-sized enterprises or start-ups needing early support,” Prakash said.
Many large crypto companies have integrated multi-party computing (MPC) capabilities into their services via acquisitions over the past couple of years. Coinbase purchased Unbound Security, a crypto custody infrastructure company specializing in MPC, in November 2021; Blockdaemon acquired Sepior, a digital asset security company that offers key management services to institutional clients, in July 2022. The market size for privacy-enhancing technologies (like MPC) is expected to reach a valuation of $25.8 billion. dollars by 2033, an increase of 26.6% compared to 2033. 2.4 billion in 2023.
“With deep expertise in cryptography, (the Silence team) is working on a set of revolutionary products in privacy and authentication infrastructure,” said Anurag Arjun, founding partner of Kira Studio and former co-founder by Polygon. “Privacy-preserving infrastructure, combined with blockchain and fintech rails, is going to be huge. »
Tech
