Belfort Raises $6M In Seed Funding Led By Vsquared Ventures

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Belfort Labs, a KU Leuven spin-off developing hardware accelerators for fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), closed a $6 million seed funding round led by Vsquared Ventures. The round attracted a diverse investor base, including institutional VCs like Anagram, Protocol VC, Inovia Capital, Syndicate One, Prototype, and Credibly Neutral, alongside prominent angels such as Jeff Dean (Google’s Chief Scientist) and Naval Ravikant.

Belfort’s latest seed round marks a pivotal moment for the company, enabling it to transition from research prototypes to commercial hardware solutions. Founded in 2025 as a spin-off from KU Leuven’s COSIC lab, Belfort addresses a critical gap in secure computing by accelerating encrypted data processing without decryption, targeting high-stakes industries where data privacy is paramount.

The $6 million seed round was announced alongside the launch of Belfort’s first hardware accelerator, designed specifically for encrypted compute. This funding comes at a time when FHE technologies are gaining traction due to increasing regulatory pressures (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA) and high-profile breaches in finance and healthcare. The round’s structure reflects strong validation from deep-tech investors, with a focus on hardware innovation rather than software-only solutions.

Investor Analysis

The investor syndicate blends European deep-tech expertise with U.S. AI and crypto heavyweights, signaling Belfort’s cross-Atlantic ambitions. Vsquared Ventures, as lead, brings sector-specific knowledge, having backed similar hardware plays in quantum and AI infrastructure. Angels like Jeff Dean and Naval Ravikant add credibility—Dean’s AI leadership at Google aligns with Belfort’s potential in encrypted AI models, while Ravikant’s crypto influence ties into Belfort’s blockchain use cases.

Strategic Implications

This funding positions Belfort to capture early market share in a projected $10+ billion FHE market by 2030, driven by AI’s data demands. Early pilots, such as a proof-of-concept with SWIFT for secure financial messaging, demonstrate traction. However, challenges like high energy costs for FHE and competition from software libraries (e.g., Microsoft’s SEAL) persist. The dual-office setup (Leuven for R&D, San Francisco for go-to-market) leverages EU grants (e.g., ERC Advanced) and U.S. talent pools.

Belfort’s team—led by CEO/CTO Michiel Van Beirendonck (ZPrize winner, ex-Microsoft Research), COO Laurens De Poorter (ex-Google[x], Kraken), Chief Scientist Ingrid Verbauwhede (KU Leuven professor, DARPA collaborator), and Engineering Lead Furkan Turan (ex-Intel)—combines academic rigor with industry execution. Their patented streaming architecture reduces FHE computation times from hours to minutes, a key differentiator.

Belfort Labs emerged from KU Leuven’s storied COSIC lab in April 2025, rapidly evolving from theoretical research in fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) to a hardware-centric startup addressing one of cybersecurity’s holy grails: processing sensitive data without ever exposing it in plaintext. The company’s latest $6 million seed round not only funds this pivot but also coincides with the unveiling of its inaugural hardware accelerator—a purpose-built chip that slashes FHE latencies by orders of magnitude, making real-time applications feasible in domains like national security, finance, healthcare, and blockchain.

Historical Context and Evolution

Belfort’s roots trace to DARPA’s DPRIVE program and European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grants awarded to Prof. Ingrid Verbauwhede, whose cryptographic hardware expertise has influenced projects at Intel, Google, and Stanford. Co-founders Michiel Van Beirendonck and Furkan Turan, both KU Leuven PhDs, developed the core streaming architecture during their tenure at COSIC—Van Beirendonck’s innovations earned the inaugural ZPrize for FHE acceleration, while Turan’s work included patents in hardware protection and FPGA optimizations from Intel internships. Laurens De Poorter, with his MBA from Harvard and stints at Google[x] and Kraken Ventures, joined to bridge tech commercialization and crypto ecosystems, founding Syndicate One to nurture similar ventures.

Prior to this round, Belfort operated on seed grants and lab funding, incorporating in Leuven (VAT: BE1021971016) with a lean team of six. The spin-off status provided IP ownership, including Van Beirendonck’s patented architecture, which enables “streaming” FHE operations to minimize memory overhead—a breakthrough over traditional batch-processing methods that bottleneck scalability.

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Round Mechanics and Terms

Announced via PRNewswire and covered extensively in tech outlets, the seed round was oversubscribed, reflecting investor enthusiasm for hardware solutions in an AI-driven world where data breaches cost $4.88 million on average (IBM 2025 report). While valuation remains undisclosed—typical for early seeds in Europe—the lead from Vsquared Ventures suggests a pre-money figure in the $15-25 million range, based on comparable deep-tech deals like those in quantum computing.

The syndicate’s composition is noteworthy: Seven institutional VCs provide diversified geographic and thematic coverage, while angels inject star power. Vsquared, managing €130 million across two funds, led with a likely anchor investment of $2-3 million, emphasizing their thesis on “technologies advancing society” through novel compute. Anagram and Protocol VC add U.S. Web3 angles, Inovia brings Canadian scaling muscle, and European players like Prototype and Syndicate One (De Poorter’s firm) ensure regional alignment. Credibly Neutral, focused on verifiable tech, rounds out the institutions.

Angels Jeff Dean and Naval Ravikant participated via personal checks, estimated at $250,000-$500,000 each. Dean’s involvement—given his role in Google’s FHE consultations—signals potential synergies with cloud providers, while Ravikant’s crypto pedigree (backing 100+ startups) positions Belfort for DeFi pilots.

Allocation and Milestones

Proceeds are earmarked across three pillars:

1. Talent Acquisition: Doubling from ~6 to 12-15 employees in 12-18 months, prioritizing chip designers (e.g., ASIC/FPGA specialists), cryptographers, and go-to-market roles. Recruitment targets U.S. and EU hubs, leveraging KU Leuven’s talent pipeline.
2. R&D Acceleration: Finalizing a custom ASIC chip, building on FPGA prototypes that already achieve 10-100x speedups over CPU-based FHE. This includes integration with libraries like OpenFHE and testing against benchmarks from the ZPrize competition.
3. Commercial Traction: Rolling out pilots with enterprises—e.g., SWIFT PoC for encrypted transaction validation—and expanding use cases. In finance, this enables real-time fraud detection on ciphertext; in healthcare, collaborative genomics without data sharing; in government, secure intel analysis.

Belfort’s tech stack emphasizes “confidentiality by design”: Data remains encrypted end-to-end, mitigating insider threats and cloud vulnerabilities. Performance metrics from demos show operations that once took hours now completing in minutes, with scalability for petabyte-scale datasets.

Market Positioning and Competitive Landscape

The FHE market, valued at $120 million in 2024, is forecasted to reach $12 billion by 2030 (MarketsandMarkets), fueled by AI’s privacy needs—e.g., training models on encrypted patient data. Belfort differentiates via hardware: Competitors like Microsoft’s SEAL or IBM’s HELib are software-only, suffering 1,000x slowdowns; hardware peers (e.g., Cornami’s ARES chip) focus on older schemes like CKKS, while Belfort optimizes for TFHE (Torus FHE) for faster bootstrapping.

Challenges include energy efficiency—FHE remains compute-intensive—and ecosystem adoption, requiring SDKs for integration with TensorFlow or Ethereum. Belfort’s edge lies in its academic pedigree: Verbauwhede’s ERC grants (two Advanced awards) and DARPA ties provide non-dilutive validation, potentially unlocking SBIR/STTR funding in the U.S.

Broader Impact and Outlook

This round arrives amid heightened scrutiny on data sovereignty—e.g., post-2025 breaches at Equifax and Change Healthcare exposed millions. Belfort’s “trust is all you need” ethos resonates, positioning it as a foundational layer for an “AI-first world” where models process encrypted inputs natively. Early wins like the SWIFT PoC hint at revenue potential: A single enterprise license could exceed $1 million annually.

Looking ahead, Belfort eyes a Series A in 2027, post-chip tape-out, with ambitions for partnerships (e.g., Google Cloud integration via Dean). Risks include supply chain delays for fabs and regulatory hurdles for export-controlled crypto tech, but the investor backing mitigates these. Ultimately, Belfort exemplifies Europe’s deep-tech resurgence, blending Leuven’s research excellence with Silicon Valley’s commercialization speed.

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