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
- A corner of the internet broke yesterday when OpenAI released a solution to one of the biggest mathematical problems of our times: the Navier-Stokes problem. We could talk for hours about these beautiful equations that were very meaningful to me for a brief period in my life while studying fluid dynamics, but the drama was not about the maths... The drama was about whether or not OpenAI had looked into the chat logs of a competing team of mathematicians that had been working on a solution, and was using OpenAI frontier models to
- Google just published its answer to the private AI problem, and we're proud to be one of the main collaborators behind it. At the centre is HEIR, an open source compiler that converts ordinary models into ones that run on encrypted data. That conversion used to require a team of cryptographers. HEIR opens it up to everyone else. Two of the four applications Google showcases are collaborations with Belfort: an ad recommendation model built with LG Electronics and New York University that unlocks private content recommendations, and a
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