A close-up shows an Intel Nahuku board, each of which contains eight to 32 Intel Loihi neuromorphic research chips. Intel’s latest neuromorphic computing system, Pohoiki Springs, was unveiled in March 2020. It is made up of 24 Nahuku boards with 32 chips each, integrating a total of 768 Loihi chips. (Credit: Tim Herman/Intel Corporation)

Today, fabless semiconductor company Cornami announced it has closed a Series C funding round led by Softbank Vision Fund 2 with over $68 million.

Cornami has generated significant investor interest because it offers a TruStream Computational Fabric architecture that can deliver real-time computing power for critical and complex applications. 

Its 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 FHE race 

The announcement comes as organization’s are starting to recognize the potential risks of post-quantum threats, particularly 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 Cornami, CEO, Dr. Wally Rhines. 

“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,”

Rhines explains that 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. 

A brief look at the quantum cryptography market 

Just as Cornami is in a state of growth, researchers value the global market for quantum cryptography at $128.9 million in 2022, and anticipate that it will reach a total value of $291.9 million by 2026 as more organizations invest in quantum computing to enhance their computing power and quantum cryptography to protect their data. 

Cornami is competing against a number of extremely prominent providers including Nvidia, which recently announced raising quarterly revenue of $7.64 billion, and offers a solution called NVIDIA cuQuantum, an SDK of optimized libraries and tools designed to help developers accelerate quantum computing workflows. 

It’s also competing against Intel, who develops ‘hot’ silicon spin-qubits, computing devices that can operate at higher temperatures, and recently sent quantum computing equipment to the US Department of Energy’s Argonne national Laboratory (ANL) to be installed in Argonne’s quantum foundry to test new quantum materials and devices. 

Right now, Rhines argues that Cornami’s flexibility, and its ability to “dial the scale by sizing its compute fabric to meet specific customer requirements,” is what differentiates it from these larger providers.