Belfort secures €2.5M EIC Transition grant
San Francisco / Leuven, May 1, 2026 Belfort has been selected by the European Innovation Council (EIC) for its Transition programme, securing up to €2.5 million to advance dedicated hardware for encrypted computing. Belfort's current hardware platform is built on general-purpose chips (both FPGAs and GPUs) to serve commercial customers. The EIC grant funds the next step: a purpose-built Belfort chip designed to deliver order-of-magnitude gains in speed and efficiency.
Belfort was selected from 611 applications as one of 40 funded projects, and one of three named in the EIC's official announcement.
A spin-off from KU Leuven's COSIC lab, Belfort builds infrastructure that lets organizations compute on encrypted data without ever decrypting it. The grant continues a research lineage funded by the EU since the ERC grants awarded to professor Ingrid Verbauwhede, Belfort's Co-Founder and Chief Scientist.
Making encrypted compute practical
Today's infrastructure requires data to be decrypted before it can be processed, exposing it at the most critical moment. That window, however brief, is when breaches happen. Encrypted Compute removes that constraint, but on conventional hardware it runs orders of magnitude slower than standard computation.
Closing that gap requires a step-change rather than incremental improvement. Belfort is building a full-stack solution, advancing across algorithms, systems, and hardware to make Encrypted Compute run at real-world scale.
Chips designed specifically for encrypted workloads are the critical enabler, delivering the gains in throughput and energy efficiency that bring applications like encrypted AI inference, confidential analytics, and privacy-preserving data collaboration within reach of production deployment. The path from research prototype to production silicon runs through tape-out, a milestone that requires both validated architecture and significant capital. The EIC Transition grant funds the groundwork that makes the larger investment case possible.
A European foundation for digital sovereignty
Faster Encrypted Compute changes more than benchmarks. Once the performance penalty disappears, encryption can stay on by default, and that shifts who needs to be trusted with sensitive data.
Because data stays encrypted during processing, it no longer needs to be trusted to the environment computing it. Organizations can use cloud or shared infrastructure without relinquishing control over sensitive information.
That makes Encrypted Compute a practical foundation for digital sovereignty, and a strategic one for Europe. EU funding for European silicon in a category defined by control over sensitive data is a deliberate bet on infrastructure that keeps trust local while enabling computation to scale globally.
About Belfort
At Belfort, we believe that in an AI-first world, trust is all you need and the future of computing is encrypted. Belfort enables that vision by accelerating Encrypted Compute to make it practical at scale, ensuring that sensitive data can be processed without ever being decrypted. A spin-off from KU Leuven’s world-renowned COSIC lab, Belfort combines breakthroughs in hardware and algorithms to build the next layer of secure computing. The company has offices in San Francisco, USA, and Leuven, Belgium. https://belfortlabs.com/
About EIC Transition
EIC Transition is a European Innovation Council funding scheme designed for research teams and deeptech ventures to mature breakthrough technologies from proof of concept to investment-ready innovation. Operated by the European Innovation Council and SMEs Executive Agency (EISMEA) under Horizon Europe, it supports single applicants and small consortia in advancing technology validation, business case development, and market readiness for European industry and society at large.
