Belfort kicks off commercialisation push with Google deal

San Francisco / Leuven, March 25, 2026 — Belfort, a company pioneering the infrastructure layer for Encrypted Compute, today announced that Google has become its first paying customer. The engagement marks a key milestone in advancing Encrypted Compute from research into practical systems.

The announcement comes amid a massive global buildout of AI infrastructure, with industry leaders projecting over $1 trillion in compute demand in the coming years. As AI systems move into real-world deployment, a new challenge is emerging: how to run these systems on sensitive data without exposing it. Recent pressure tests of enterprise AI systems, including a widely reported case involving an internal platform at McKinsey & Company [link], has shown how quickly autonomous agents can gain access to sensitive data once it is processed in plaintext.

Encrypted Compute offers a solution by enabling the processing of sensitive information without decryption, preserving cloud flexibility while eliminating exposure risks. While the concept has existed for years, performance limitations have prevented widespread adoption. Belfort addresses this bottleneck through a high-performance acceleration layer purpose-built for encrypted workloads.

Advancing Encrypted Compute

Beyond performance, usability is the other primary obstacle, specifically the difficulty of  converting calculations to FHE friendly operations. To address this, Google is developing HEIR (heir.dev), a compiler and development platform that simplifies the integration of these techniques into practical systems.  Combined with Belfort’s high-performance acceleration layer, this creates a unified stack for Encrypted Compute, from developer tooling to execution.

“Google’s ability to connect advanced research with large-scale systems makes them an ideal partner for Belfort. It enables us to evaluate and improve our technology against real-world workloads, helping ensure we are building a robust and scalable foundation for Encrypted Compute.”

— Laurens De Poorter, Belfort Co-Founder & CEO

At its core, Encrypted Compute is powered by Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), widely regarded as the holy grail of cryptography, which enables arbitrary computations to be performed directly on encrypted data. Belfort’s platform is designed to make FHE practical by delivering the performance and usability required for real-world applications.

“Bringing Fully Homomorphic Encryption into the mainstream requires a robust ecosystem of interoperable tools and high-performance hardware. Belfort’s commitment to building a transparent, compiler-friendly acceleration layer is exactly the kind of industry-standard approach needed to move FHE from theoretical research into production environments. We believe that this synergy between advanced hardware acceleration and user-centric software abstraction will be the cornerstone of future secure computation infrastructure, enabling a new class of enterprise applications that prioritize data sovereignty.”

— Jeremy Kun, Google HEIR Lead

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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/

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About HEIR

HEIR (heir.dev) is a compiler toolchain for fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) designed for developers and researchers to build production-grade, privacy-preserving applications. Maintained by Google's FHE/HEIR team within Safeworks, it supports application developers, compiler engineers, and hardware designers in advancing secure, encrypted systems for Alphabet and society at large. https://heir.dev/