Belfort, a KU Leuven spin-off building the future of encrypted compute, announced the close of its $6 million seed round to bring encrypted data processing into practical, real-time use. The round was led by deep-tech specialist Vsquared Ventures, with participation from Anagram, Protocol VC, Inovia Capital, Syndicate One, Prototype, Credibly Neutral, and high-profile angel investors including Jeff Dean (Google’s Chief Scientist) and Naval Ravikant. The funding will enable Belfort to double its team, advance product development, and support early enterprise pilots across its San Francisco and Leuven offices.
In July, it was revealed that a UK Ministry of Defence breach had exposed nearly 19,000 Afghan nationals and intelligence personnel, triggering an emergency response estimated at £7 billion (nearly $10 billion). Such incidents highlight the need to protect data not just at rest, but also while it is being processed. Belfort’s hardware accelerator, the first purpose-built for encrypted compute, makes it possible to process data directly in encrypted form, eliminating exposure to servers, cloud providers, or insiders with privileged access. By removing the long-standing performance barriers of encrypted computation, Belfort makes large-scale deployment practical. Already available on AWS Marketplace, its technology can be applied across blockchain, finance, healthcare, and government operations.
“AI is transforming everything, but the infrastructure to keep sensitive data and models secure hasn’t caught up,” said Michiel Van Beirendonck, Co-Founder & CEO of Belfort. “Encrypted compute is the answer, but without hardware acceleration, it doesn’t scale. The company that solves that could become the next billion-dollar player.”
Belfort’s technology builds on years of research from KU Leuven’s COSIC lab, from the group of Prof. Ingrid Verbauwhede, Co-Founder & Chief Scientist of Belfort and global authority in cryptographic hardware. Co-founders Michiel Van Beirendonck and Furkan Turan developed the underlying breakthroughs, and are joined by Laurens De Poorter, former crypto VC at Kraken Ventures and strategist at Google[x]. Their work has been supported by major European Research Council grants and by participating in a competitive U.S. government contract with DARPA.
Photo Caption: The Belfort founding team: Laurens De Poorter (ex Kraken Ventures & Google[x]), Dr Furkan Turan (PhD KU Leuven, ex Intel), Michiel Van Beirendonck (PhD KU Leuven, ex Microsoft Research & Rambus) and Prof Ingrid Verbauwhede (Prof KU Leuven, Visiting Prof Stanford). Belfort makes encrypted compute, the ability to process data without ever decrypting it, fast and practical through custom silicon.