Silence Laboratories, a web3 focused cybersecurity startup headquartered in Singapore, said Thursday it has closed a $1.7 million round in a seed funding led by Pi Ventures.
The round also included participation from web3 centric funds such as imToken ventures and prominent angels like Daniel Ari Friedman, Mahin Gupta, CK Vishwakarma, Priyeshu Garg, Ashish Tiwari, and more, Silence Laboratories said in a statement.
The startup plans to use this funding to further widen its product offerings towards developer centric decentralised security stack, strengthen its team and scale its go-to-market operations to help enterprises adopt state of the art authentication and authorization techniques.
“Account takeover due to single point of failures of the private keys is on unparalleled rise and have been affecting enterprises and different sectors of Web3 businesses. Hence, the internet is witnessing a growing push towards distributed authentication protocols and signature schemes and Silence Laboratories is at the forefront of this revolution,” said Jay Prakash, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder at Silence Laboratories.
“Wallet cloning, browser wallet extension hacks, phished DEX and CEX websites are all compromised examples of bad authentication practices in Web3. We want Web3 folks to talk to us about fixing this. We’re happy to make custom collaborations as needed, but we must do this together, as an industry”, he added.
Silence Laboratories is on a mission to build a developer focused cryptographic stack and is motivated to democratizing non-trivial libraries. It has been working closely with several leading players, in the Web 3 ecosystem particularly, to develop the flagship products- Silent Shard and Silent Auth.
They are designed to support varied demands of authentication and authorizations with very high degree of contextualization, be it for digital asset custodians with high risks, non-custodial digital wallets, semi-custodial phone based wallets, online exchanges with high expectations on usability, or web3-centric cloud service providers.
Silence Laboratories core technology to support developer focused decentralised and high grade security for digital assets with functionalities of key management, distributed signature and authorization is built on top of a unique fusion of multi-party computation (MPC), sensing and intelligent signal processing.
“Our cryptographic libraries hope to remove several active attack vectors prevalent in the industry today. In our pursuit to facilitate easier adoption of our libraries and helping enterprises develop together, we recently joined premier global alliances such MPC alliance and Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF),” said Andrei Bytes, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder at Silence Laboratories.
According to Prakash, Silence Laboratories’s team integrated Silent Shard with MetaMask’s Snaps which in itself is a great example of how MetaMask has opened the wallet design ecosystem, and the Snap based designs will help to enhance wallet security and set benchmarks for MPC based wallets.
Silence Laboratories is working on setting up an Applied Cryptography and Web3 Security corporate research and development (R&D) centre in South Asia, with local and international collaborations. The centre will attract some of the best talents globally to contribute in solving niche problems in usable security and MPC algorithms and set the backbone for several upcoming businesses and products.
The firm is open to collaborators, and enjoys co-development and R&D calls with partners across the Web3 and hybrid Web2 industry.
“Issues with private key management have led to loss of billions of dollars in 2022 alone. The holy trifecta of ironclad security, great user experience and developer-friendliness for Web 3 is yet to be cracked and we believe the team at Silence Laboratories is best placed to solve this,” said Shubham Sandeep, Managing Director of pi Ventures.