Belfort, a spin-off from KU Leuven’s COSIC lab, has raised 5 million euros in seed funding to advance its breakthrough technology enabling fast AI computations on encrypted data.
The round was led by Vsquared Ventures, with participation from Anagram, angel investors such as Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, and entrepreneur Naval Ravikant.
Belfort’s “encrypted compute” platform allows sensitive information – such as medical records or financial data – to remain encrypted while still being processed by AI systems. This addresses a major security gap highlighted by recent data leaks, offering a scalable way to extract insights without exposing personal identifiers.
The startup, which has offices in Leuven and San Francisco, plans to double its team and accelerate product development. CEO Michiel Van Beirendonck said encrypted compute is “the answer to protecting sensitive data”, but requires hardware acceleration to become scalable. This is a challenge Belfort aims to solve with its own future chips.
With applications in healthcare, finance, and government, the company hopes to position itself as a future European deeptech unicorn.
