# Fabric Cryptography

> Fabric Cryptography is a San Francisco hardware startup building the Verifiable Processing Unit (VPU) - a fully programmable custom-silicon chip with an instruction set designed specifically for advanced cryptography. Founded in 2021 by Michael Gao, Tina Ju, and Sagar Reddy, Fabric aims to do for cryptography what Nvidia did for AI: dramatically accelerate workloads like zero-knowledge proofs, fully homomorphic encryption, and multi-party computation compared with CPUs, GPUs, and fixed-function accelerators. The company has raised $39M total, including a $33M Series A in August 2024 co-led by Blockchain Capital and 1kx.

- **Founded:** 2021
- **Headquarters:** San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founders:** Michael Gao (Co-Founder & CEO), Tina Ju (Co-Founder), Sagar Reddy (Co-Founder)
- **Team size:** ~25-60 employees (AI hardware/software engineers and cryptographers, many from Nvidia, Apple, Google, Amazon, and Galois)
- **Products:** Verifiable Processing Unit (VPU), Cryptography software stack & compiler
- **Notable:** Raised $39M total across seed and Series A rounds by 2024, Secured tens of millions of dollars in VPU pre-orders, including an early ~$50M purchase order before the product existed, Designed the first custom-silicon chip with an instruction set architecture specific to cryptography

## Products & services

- **Verifiable Processing Unit (VPU)** — The first general-purpose, fully programmable custom-silicon chip with an instruction set architecture specific to cryptography. It decomposes any cryptographic algorithm into mathematical building blocks - such as finite-field arithmetic - that are natively accelerated in hardware, targeting zero-knowledge proofs, fully homomorphic encryption, and multi-party computation.
- **Cryptography software stack & compiler** — A software stack and compiler that lets developers map cryptographic algorithms and libraries onto the VPU's cryptography-native instruction set, spanning proof systems and finite-field workloads.

## Achievements

- Raised $39M total across seed and Series A rounds by 2024
- Secured tens of millions of dollars in VPU pre-orders, including an early ~$50M purchase order before the product existed
- Designed the first custom-silicon chip with an instruction set architecture specific to cryptography
- Assembled a team of engineers and cryptographers from Nvidia, Apple, Google, Amazon, and Galois
- Reached the final stages of tapeout toward production of the VPU

## Latest updates

- **2025-03** — Michael Gao featured in a talk on taping out a custom processor for cryptography, detailing the VPU's path to production.
- **2024-12** — Presented 'Enabling Real-Time ZK with VPU x Boundless' at Devcon 7 in Bangkok.
- **2024-08** — Closed $33M Series A co-led by Blockchain Capital and 1kx; entered final stages of VPU tapeout.

## Links

- Website: https://fabriccryptography.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fabriccryptography
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/FabricCrypto

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/fabric-cryptography
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-07-12