Dutch start-up completes funding round for encrypted silicon technology

A Dutch start-up has raised $50mn for a technology that harnesses the unique digital fingerprint of silicon chips to secure the computer networks powering everything from drones and satellites to driverless cars.

Fortaegis, an Amsterdam-based firm with offices in the US, Europe and Asia, is working with 25 companies and nations to build a “secure compute” system for industries including defence, space, telecoms and data centres.

Boudewijn Wijnands, founder and chief executive, said the technology would help the west and its allies in a world in which security increasingly depends on “who controls the foundations of compute”. The rapid advancement of AI has intensified concerns over network and data security.

Fortaegis is working with governments in the US, UK, Japan, Singapore, Germany, France and the Netherlands. National laboratories in some of those countries have validated the three-year-old company’s technology, according to Wijnands.

He said Fortaegis had raised $50mn to begin commercial manufacturing in 2027. The round was led by Serendipity Capital, a Singapore-based venture capital firm, and included the venture capital arm of Tokyo Electron, Japan’s largest chipmaking equipment manufacturer.

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The technology exploits a property of silicon that gives every chip a unique digital fingerprint. Fortaegis extracts those fingerprints to generate and randomise encryption keys. Because the keys are constantly changing and are not stored on devices, the company says the system is more secure than conventional approaches. Embedding the technology in hardware also provides an additional layer of security compared with relying on software.

“The big innovation is that we were able to extract that fingerprint and extract keys from that,” Wijnands said.

He added that the secure compute architecture was “quantum safe” because the keys were created randomly and organically, not by mathematical models.

“It’s basically a gift of Mother Nature,” Wijnands said. “A quantum computer can only crack something if there’s a mathematical model.”

Embedding the technology in hardware offered several advantages, Wijnands said, including helping ensure data sovereignty, an increasing concern for companies and governments around the world.

It also speeds up communication between devices on networks. Wijnands said external tests had shown that its system communicates at 200 times the speed of current cryptographic protocols used to protect data sent over the internet.

Faster communications could, for example, allow the creation of much bigger constellations of drones or autonomous vehicles. Militaries could also use the technology to authenticate the data transmitted from sensors that are a critical part of “combat cloud environments”.

The company has engaged with Nato and is taking part in exercises designed to better integrate emerging technologies into military systems.

Fortaegis is working on several projects with the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO), including one using its technology to create huge swarms of tens of thousands of drones.

Kees Buijsrogge, TNO’s head of space and scientific instrumentation, said they wanted to create optical connectivity between drones, a much faster method of communication to reduce the barriers to big swarms and also prevent jamming.

Wijnands said the company had signed contracts with more than one country to help build massive drone swarms.

TNO has also validated Fortaegis’s technology. Marc Zegveld, head of the group that ran the tests, said it had employed the most aggressive forms of hacking possible but had been unable to penetrate Fortaegis’s integrated architecture.

Wijnands said Fortaegis was in talks with US hyperscalers and AI labs. It is also involved in a project with ASML, the Dutch manufacturer of the world’s most advanced lithography machines for making chips, and Eindhoven University of Technology to develop a security framework for autonomous AI systems.

Paul Taylor, a former senior UK government technical national security expert and now a member of the UK Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology, who has evaluated the technology, said it was impressive.

“It’s very exciting,” said Taylor, who has no commercial stake. “It’s one of the most applicable and implementable hardware security systems I’ve seen.”

Taylor said adversaries such as China would not be able to access the encryption keys. “They could steal the technology, like they can steal rockets or lasers or whatever. But the idea that they could break in and get a key . . . is not a thing.”

Mitsunobu Koshiba, one of the highest-profile figures in Japan’s chip industry and a Fortaegis board member, said the potential applications in Japan included protecting chipmaking equipment — the country’s “crown jewels” — from China, which is trying to reverse-engineer them.

The technology could also help create “trusted networks” to reassure international partners that Japan was becoming better at protecting intellectual property in projects such as a joint programme with the UK and Italy to build fighter jets.

Ilyas Khan, chair of Fortaegis and founder of the recently listed quantum-computing company Quantinuum, described the technology as the “Holy Grail” and predicted it would become the “standard for security on silicon”.

Robert Jesudason, CEO of Serendipity and a Fortaegis board member, said his firm invested because of the technology and potential market size.

“Boudewijn is not trying to build a unicorn,” said Jesudason. “He’s trying to build a company where the chips will be in every serious product in the world.”