Dutch chip-security startup Fortaegis Technologies has raised $50 million in an oversubscribed Series A round led by Singapore-based Serendipity Capital, to move its silicon-based “Secure Compute” technology into commercial production.

In a statement last Sunday, Amsterdam-based Fortaegis said it would utilize the money to scale production of its programmable-chip products across the United States, Europe, Singapore, and Japan. It will also advance a roadmap toward custom-designed chips, while enlarging its engineering and commercial teams.

The round was led by returning investor Serendipity Capital and included TEL Venture Capital, the venture arm of Japanese chip-equipment maker Tokyo Electron, the Dutch research organisation TNO, and Prodrive Technologies, along with several smaller funds. Individual backers included Ilyas Khan, founder of quantum-computing firm Quantinuum and Fortaegis’s chairman, and Chris Miller, a board member and author of “Chip War.”

Fortaegis builds security into the chip itself, generating encryption keys from the tiny physical variations each silicon chip acquires during manufacturing. The keys change constantly and are not permanently stored, an approach can make them harder to steal and more resistant to future quantum-computer attacks.

Fortaegis said its architecture was quantum-safe by design and had shown connection speeds more than 200 times faster than conventional methods in internal and customer testing.

Fortaegis’s technology can help AI infrastructure, defence and autonomous systems, telecommunications, critical infrastructure and, automotive.

Chief Executive Boudewijn Wijnands said security could no longer be added on top of digital systems but had to be built into the foundations of computing. Rob Jesudason, Serendipity Capital’s chief executive, said demand for hardware-embedded security would grow as AI and quantum computing scaled.

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