Fortaegis Raises $50M for Chips That Generate Their Own Encryption Keys

Fortaegis raised an oversubscribed $50 million Series A on Sept. 13, led by Singapore's Serendipity Capital, to move its chip-level security technology into commercial production. The Amsterdam-based company, founded in October 2023, did not disclose a valuation or its total funding to date.

Other participants included TEL Venture Capital, the corporate venture arm of Japanese chip-equipment maker Tokyo Electron, along with Dutch research organization TNO, engineering firm Prodrive Technologies, NP-Hard Ventures, NovaCapital, Access Ventures and Coalition Capital. Individual investors included Ilyas Khan, founder of quantum computing company Quantinuum and now Fortaegis's chairman, Carlyle's head of global aerospace, defense and government Ian Fujiyama, and Oxford University historian Peter Frankopan.

A 200x speed claim from Fortaegis's own tests

Fortaegis's Secure Compute architecture generates encryption keys from a chip's physical manufacturing variations rather than storing them in memory, a technique known as a physically unclonable function. Because the key exists only as a byproduct of the silicon's physical structure and is never written down, the company says an attacker with a working quantum computer has nothing stored to steal. Fortaegis says the design also cuts connection setup time, claiming performance more than 200 times faster than conventional approaches in internal and customer testing.

Claim	What backs it
Quantum-resistant key generation	Company's own architecture description
Connections 200x faster	Fortaegis's internal and customer tests
Resists penetration	One evaluation, by TNO

One outside test, from a Dutch research institute

TNO, the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research and a Series A investor, tested the integrated system and reported it could not penetrate it, according to The Quantum Insider. That is one institutional evaluation, not the independent third-party security audit the company's quantum-safe claims would need to hold up broadly, the outlet wrote. Chris Miller, a Fortaegis U.S. board member and the author of "Chip War," framed the company's pitch in geopolitical terms, saying "computing infrastructure is the central arena of geopolitical and economic competition today." That framing comes from inside the company's own board, not an outside observer.

Manufacturing starts in 2027, on FPGAs first

Fortaegis said it is working with more than 25 enterprises and governments across semiconductor infrastructure, defense, AI, telecommunications and critical-infrastructure sectors, without naming any of them. The company plans to scale production of field-programmable chips carrying its architecture across the U.S., Europe, Singapore and Japan, alongside a longer-term roadmap for purpose-built chips, with commercial manufacturing set to begin in 2027.

"Security cannot remain something we add on top of digital systems, it must become part of the compute foundations," founder and chief executive Boudewijn Wijnands said in the funding announcement. Chief technology officer Peter Janssen, who also founded Dutch manufacturer Prodrive Technologies, is building the hardware side of that pitch.

The Quantum Insider's own assessment of the round put it plainly: Fortaegis's broader prospects depend on independent security assessments, manufacturing costs once production begins, and whether chipmakers and equipment suppliers are willing to build the architecture into their own commercial products. None of those tests has happened yet.

Elsewhere in chip supply chains, Samsung and SK Hynix rejected a Korean utility's request to prepay 25 trillion won in power bills for grid buildout this month, a reminder that even far larger chipmakers are still negotiating the physical infrastructure Fortaegis's much smaller architecture bet depends on downstream. Andreessen Horowitz closed an additional $1.75 billion for its Growth Fund V the same week, a sign later-stage AI infrastructure money is still moving even as Fortaegis raises at the opposite end of the stack.