Cryptography Firm Zama Joins Unicorn Club as Polymarket & Kalshi Near $1 B

ZAMA:- There’s already an ongoing buzz in web3 around the race by Crypto brands securing the Unicorn status.

The prediction market platforms, Polymarket and Kalshi, have recently been leading this race. While Polymarket is in the final stages of acquiring the Unicorn status, its competititor Kalshi crossed the $2 billion mark on June 25.

As this race continues to built up, a new cryptography company Zama has become the latest to acquire the Unicorn status. This comes after it recently closes its Series B Funding round of $57 million – putting it at a valuation of over $1 billion.

Today, we’re unveiling our most ambitious product to date: the Zama Confidential Blockchain Protocol—and announcing our $57 million Series B funding round at a valuation of over $1 billion, led by @PanteraCapital and #BlockchangeVC. Public Testnet goes live on July 1st. pic.twitter.com/zCTlhiXv35

— Zama (@zama_fhe) June 25, 2025

Founded by Rand Hindi, the Cryptography company has also unveiled Zama Confidential Blockchain Protocol to accelerate privacy on blockchains.

Zama Becomes First FHE Crypto Brand To Become Web3 Unicorn

Founded in 2020 by Dr. Pascal Paillier and Dr. Rand Hindi, Zama has been developing and leading the Fully Homomorphic encryption (FHE) technique for Blockchains. FHE promises both strong privacy and verifiable integrity by allowing computations on encrypted data without ever decrypting it.

Calling it as the “holy grail of cryptography”, Zama has been trying to broaden the applications of its pos-quauntumTechnology – FHE. For the same, while announcing its Series B, it unveiled its Zama Confidential Blockchain Protocol.

Using its Fully Homomorphic Encryption, Zama aims to enable confidential smart contacys on top of any L1 or P2. The ZAMA Protocol also leverages Multi-Party Computation (MPC) and Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZK) to build a completely confidential solution.
Interestingly, this comes as privacy on blockchains is already accelerating with the development of Privacy Pools and other products as pioneered by Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin.

We believe that just like the internet went from zero encryption with HTTP to encrypting data in transit with HTTPS, the next natural step will be to use FHE to enable end-to-end encryption by default in every application, something we call HTTPZ.

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Polymarket-Kalshi Follow in the Unicorn Race

With over 102 Web3 unicorns according to crunchbase, the industry is very much in the midst of a “unicorn race.” The new as well as leading crypto‑ and blockchain‑focused startups are crossing the $1 billion mark at an accelerating clip.

Founder and CEO Shayne Coplan-led prediction Platform, Polymarket, is already in the final stages of closing a $200 million funding round led by Founders Fund.

After this funding by Peter Thiel’s venture, the company will be put at a post-money valuation of $1 billion – thus, providing it the Unicorn status.

While Polymarket is in the final stages of acquiring the Unicorn status, its competititor Kalshi crossed the $2 billion mark on June 25 with its latest Series C.

Prior to the June 2025 raise, PitchBook data shows Kalshi’s post‑money valuation in late 2024 was about $787 million, and it had not yet been classed as a “unicorn.” It was this $185 million round led by Paradigm that lifted its valuation to $2 billion and officially vaulted Kalshi into unicorn status.

Furthermore, Zama’s attainment of unicorn status underscores both the potential of emerging cryptography brands and the confidence that VCs are placing in them with their multi‑million‑dollar bets.

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