Ingonyama CEO and Co-Founder Omer Shlomovits (LinkedIn)
Ingonyama, an Israeli startup that makes semiconductors, among other things, raised $20 million in a Seed round of funding that was led by Walden Catalyst. So, Startup Nation Israel is still moving forward, in spite of the ongoing war in Gaza.
Founded in 2021, by CEO Omer Shlomovits, a graduate of the elite IDF intelligence Unit 8200 and a serial entrepreneur, CTO Michael Asa, and VP R&D Danny Sterman.
Ingonyama calls itself a next-generation semiconductor company, focusing on Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZK) hardware acceleration. Using a broad, multidisciplinary approach and a deep understanding of the ZK landscape, the firm focuses on finding and solving computational bottlenecks in ZKPs.
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Ingonyama is the developer of ICICLE, which it says is the equivalent of PyTorch for AI, but for ZK proof generation. ICICLE is designed based on CUDA, hence currently only supports Nvidia GPUs. ICICLE enables developer teams to integrate ZK tech into their product with ease and saves them a massive amount of research effort on implementing accelerated ZK primitives.
A zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) is a method by which one party (the prover) can prove to another party (the verifier) that they know a secret without revealing the secret itself. The prover and verifier engage in a protocol, during which the prover provides the verifier with some information that convinces the verifier that the prover knows the secret. Importantly, the verifier learns nothing about the secret itself, except for the fact that the prover knows it.
ZKPs are a powerful tool that can be used to enhance privacy and security in a wide variety of applications. They are still an active area of research, and new applications for ZKPs are being discovered all the time.
“We chose investors who understand the field we are in, which is cryptography. We are developing technology that allows for privacy in places that were previously challenging,” said Ingonyama CEO and Co-Founder Omer Shlomovits. “We are a chip company, and our goal is to build a chip that enables and accelerates applications relying on advanced cryptography. We closed the round before the war started.” He says that there has even been additional interest in investing since the war started, with one investor who began negotiations during the war signing in recent days.”
