Silence Laboratories Raises $4.1M Funding to Enable Privacy Preserving Collaborative Computing

February 29, 2024 at 09:00 AM EST

--News Direct--

In the modern age, large companies are wrestling to leverage their customers’ data to provide ever-better AI-enhanced experiences but a key barrier to leveraging this opportunity is mounting public concern around data privacy, as ever-greater data processing poses risks of data leaks by hackers and malicious insiders.

Silence Laboratories is on a mission to create infrastructure to enable complex data collaborations between enterprises and entities, without any sensitive information being exposed to the other engaging parties. Silence Laboratories today announces it has raised an additional $4.1 million funding round led by Pi Ventures and Kira Studio, along with several prominent angel investors.

Silence Laboratories team is on a mission to enable a global privacy-compliant collaboration infrastructure.

Leveraging modern cryptography, the company already has one of the fastest distributed signature (authorization) libraries in production (Silent Shard), which has been audited by some of the best security auditing companies like Trail of Bits. These libraries have led to the establishment of strong partnerships with leading digital asset infrastructure and protocol companies like BitGo, MetaMask, EigenLayer, Biconomy, and EasyCrypto.

Products on offer by the company include Silent Shard which allows enterprises and users to limit the risk of exposing sensitive private keys and allows advanced authorisation rules to be put in place. Additionally, the newly launched Silent Compute product allows different organisations to collaborate on processing information without needing to expose their secrets and data to third parties and enrich insights while maintaining compliance and trust. Both the products uses multi-party computation (MPC) as its core cryptographic primitives.

Silence Laboratories founders: (L to R) Dr. Tony Quek, Dr. Andrei Bytes and Dr. Jay Prakash

Commenting on the announcement, Silence Laboratories CEO and founder Dr. Jay Prakash said: “In today's digital ecosystem, trust, and privacy are not merely options but imperatives for sustainable growth. With this new injection of funds, Silence Laboratories is poised to redefine privacy by enabling businesses to fully embrace the power of AI while rigorously protecting their most vital asset – customer trust. Our privacy-enhancing technologies assure that collaboration and innovation can flourish in an environment where the confidentiality and integrity of data are uncompromised.”

With the market for privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) growing globally at a compound annual growth rate of 26.6%, there is growing demand for Silence Laboratories offering to provide mathematical guarantees for techno-legal expectations. This would allow companies to work together on processing data, without needing to share data with the other party - allowing more sectors to benefit from new technology, with less risk.

Shubham Sandeep, Managing Director Pi Ventures, commented: "Secure data collaboration to enable privacy preserving compute is an ever growing problem especially in highly regulated domains such as finance and healthcare. This requires solutions based on zero trust cryptographic guarantees instead of relying on third party data vendors who are prone to security breaches. The MPC infrastructure developed by the world class team at Silence Laboratories is the fastest in the world, easily configurable, application agnostic and provides full control to the user. We are excited to double down on our investment as we have seen the fantastic progress of the company over the last 18 months."

The funding will be used to scale the company’s tech & business teams and enrich the company’s robust R&D pipeline. Founded in 2021 by Dr. Jay Prakash (CEO), Dr. Andrei Bytes (CTO) and Dr. Tony Quek; the firm has also recently been expanding its global leadership team across cryptography, infrastructure business and engineering.

“The Silence team is an amazing team with deep cryptography expertise and is working on a set of groundbreaking products in privacy and authentication infrastructure and I am really excited to support their journey. Privacy-preserving infrastructure combined with blockchain and fintech rails is going to be huge!” shared Anurag Arjun, from Kira Studio and Ex Co-founder of Polygon.

About Silence Laboratories

Started in 2021 by Dr. Jay Prakash (CEO) and Dr. Andrei Bytes (CTO), Silence Laboratories is a privacy tech company that enables enterprises to adopt privacy-enhancing technologies through a unique fusion of cryptography and security engineering. Their mission is to enable a global privacy-compliant collaboration infrastructure that would enable enterprises to collaborate, and exchange inferences while removing all single points of failure.

The company has been founded by a strong technical and business team including PhDs and researchers with previous affiliations at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA; Singapore University of Technology & Design (SUTD) & National University of Singapore (NUS); University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), globally top-ranked Capture The Flag (CTF) teams, and leading tech companies. Learn more about their work: https://silencelaboratories.com