Cornami raises $68M to support quantum encryption

(VentureBeat) Tim Keary reports on Fabless semiconductor company Cornami announcement on its closing of a $68 million series C funding round led by Softbank Vision Fund 2. IQT-News summarizes below.
Cornami’s solution provides enterprises with a foundation they can use to accelerate Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) to encrypt data against post-quantum threats faster. Cornami’s approach not only reduces application latency in the cloud and at the network’s edge, but also lowers the overall power consumption of apps.
The announcement comes as organizations are starting to recognize the potential risks of post-quantum threats. This comes after the White House released a memorandum noting that quantum computing poses a “significant risk” to the economic and national security of the United States.
Cornami is aiming to accelerate the race toward FHE by providing a high-performance computing solution that enables post-quantum encryption to function more efficiently.
“FHE has long been described as transformative for data privacy and cloud security. The algorithm was developed to enable computing on encrypted data sets; however, it is extremely compute-intensive,” said Wally Rhines, CEO of Cornami.
“Current processors cannot scale to meet performance requirements, making it impractical for commercial deployment. The existing approach for encryption schemes requires decrypting the data before using, creating vulnerabilities,” he added.
According to Rhines, Cornami’s focus on FHE enables organizations to extract valuable data analytics from enterprise apps without decrypting data and exposing it in plaintext, whether its intellectual property, personally identifiable information, or financial information.

Sandra K. Helsel, Ph.D. has been researching and reporting on frontier technologies since 1990.  She has her Ph.D. from the University of Arizona.