Overview
Belfort emerged from the COSIC research group at KU Leuven, one of Europe's leading cryptography research units. The company is building hardware that accelerates computation on encrypted data, a capability known as homomorphic or confidential computing, which allows processing sensitive data without first decrypting it.
The $6M seed round closed in September 2025. The use case spans healthcare, finance, and government data processing where privacy regulations impose strict constraints on data handling.
Belfort represents the commercialization of fundamental cryptography research from KU Leuven's COSIC lab, which has a long track record of producing applied security technology.
Funding history
- Seed: $6M (September 2025)
Key people
In the news
- Last week we launched Belfort eML, our encrypted machine learning cloud. First milestone down, many more ahead. Making encrypted computing fast and usable has always been at the core of what we do, and none of that happens without our incredible team. Every week someone figures out how to support more models that run encrypted end-to-end, or how to squeeze larger models onto the same hardware stack. But now our hardest problems are shifting. We need to decide which products to build next, which AI models to make private first, and
- They say you should never be the smartest person in the room. Well, mission accomplished! 😉 At Belfort, we've built a team of 18 math olympiad winners, hardware bug hunters, and people who invent cryptographic schemes for fun. Together we’re realizing the dream of end-to-end encrypted intelligence. Last week we launched eML Cloud, our biggest product launch yet. What we’re building next is even bigger... Agentic coding lets small teams move mountains, but as the mountains keep getting bigger, we’re looking for a few more
- During my PhD, my focus was always on making encrypted computing fast. At Belfort, we’re now just as focused on making it accessible. When we started, speed was the biggest hurdle to adopting Fully Homomorphic Encryption. But in our early customer conversations, a different barrier kept coming up: you needed to be a cryptographer to use it. So today we’re launching Belfort eML, our encrypted machine learning cloud. You write PyTorch, and that’s it: ✅ No fiddling with cryptographic parameters ✅ No rewriting your network into
- We spent the past year making encrypted computing incredibly fast! 🏎️💨 Turns out that wasn’t enough. In almost every customer call, we heard the same question: how do we now use this with our own models? The answer was not obvious, given only a few dozen people in the world can write encrypted models by hand. One of those people is Marc, so at some point the running joke at Belfort became: how do we put Marc in a box? 🎁 Today, we’re releasing exactly that! Meet eML: write PyTorch, and we run it on encrypted data. Under the
- My first panel ever, and I didn’t even have to leave our office building. 🎤 Last Friday, Syndicate One hosted its 10th Summit at De Hoorn in Leuven, with the theme “Small Funds, Big Impact”. Christine Hick asked Maxime Lahy and me what first-time technical founders need from their backers. I went straight from a PhD at KU Leuven to co-founding Belfort. Within a year, we grew to a team of 18, partnered with companies like Google and LG Electronics, and learned how to build a company across Leuven and San Francisco. A PhD prepares
- Making encrypted computing fast and accessible has always been our mission. Today, we're also making it fun. 🎙️🎲 It's a simple word game*. You say your guesses out loud, and a hotword model checks them, the same kind that listens for "OK Google" or "Hey Siri." The difference: your voice stays encrypted the whole time. The server does the work but never hears you. A word game is low stakes. But voice AI is already in places where the stakes are much higher. Doctors dictating patient notes. Lawyers on client calls. Defence and
- First Stop, 100 People 😲 Antwerpen, what a MASSIVE launch! Yesterday, we kicked off our back-to-school roadshow at The Beacon | Innovation Community. The mission? Building bridges across our entire startup ecosystem. We want to make the innovation and startup economy the #1 destination for top Belgian graduates launching their careers. Whether you are diving into entrepreneurship, tech, law, finance, or public policy, our goal is clear: 🌟 Connect the brightest academic minds with our boldest entrepreneurial projects. 🌟 Break down
- Last wednesday, a group of guests made their way to the Botanic Sanctuary in Antwerp, for a roundtable lunch. 🍽️ Welcomed by four hosts: Bernd Fiten and Bram Goetry from CRANIUM Digital Law, and Maarten Van Knippenberg and Jacob Mareen partners from Belfort Law. The subject at the table? The "Wet Private Opsporing", and what it actually means once you move past the article and into the daily reality of applying it. Practical tips and real dilemmas were shared. Thank you to everyone who made the trip to Antwerp and to our co-hosts
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