News, Breakthroughs & Recognition

San Francisco / Leuven – March 5, 2026 – Belfort today announced Velox, the latest iteration of its encrypted compute accelerator. Velox runs on the AMD Alveo V80 FPGAs and achieves more than 3x performance improvement over its previous generation. Velox is the fastest known acceleration for TFHE workloads and will be available both in the cloud and on-premises.

Founded as a spin-off from KU Leuven, Belfort enables computation on encrypted data, helping organizations unlock the value of sensitive data without compromising privacy.

Encrypted Compute

As AI systems become more powerful and increasingly integrated into sensitive workflows, protecting the underlying data becomes critical. Sensitive information such as patient records, financial transactions, and proprietary business intelligence must remain secure.

Traditional approaches require decrypting data before processing, exposing sensitive information to infrastructure and system operators.

Encrypted compute changes that. By enabling AI inference and computation on fully encrypted inputs, organizations can process sensitive data while ensuring it is never exposed, even to the infrastructure running the model. The result is AI that is not only powerful, but provably private.

Introducing Velox

For nearly a decade, the team has focused on bringing encrypted compute from research into production systems. Velox represents a major step forward.

The platform upgrades Belfort’s previous FPT system running on AMD Alveo U55C FPGAs to the next-generation Alveo V80, unlocking significant performance gains.

“We implemented several hardware and mathematical optimizations in our accelerator, resulting in a lean architecture that is both flexible and highly performant. The initial release of Velox runs at 300 MHz, with further clock improvements planned in future iterations.”

^{—  Furkan Turan, Belfort Co-Founder & Head of Engineering}

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Velox also launches with native multi-FPGA support, transparently partitioning and distributing encrypted workloads across all available accelerators, with zero user-side orchestration. This capability is not currently available on other encrypted compute platforms.

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Throughput (PBS/s) Benchmarks:

Designed for real-world use

Alongside hardware improvements, Belfort has significantly expanded its software integration layer.

Velox integrates with widely used fully homomorphic encryption frameworks, including Google HEIR and TFHE-rs, allowing developers to run encrypted workloads using familiar tooling.

“Our goal is to make encrypted compute accessible. Customers can request access and be running workloads on our hardware within minutes. confidential ERC-20 token transfers per second, demonstrating the performance required for real-world applications.”

^{—  Michiel Van Beirendonck, Belfort Co-Founder & CTO}

What this enables

Encrypted compute allows organizations to process sensitive data without ever exposing it, enabling entirely new privacy-preserving applications.

2x faster encrypted fraud detection:

In collaboration with SWIFT, Belfort developed a fraud detection workflow that checks encrypted bank transactions against sanction lists. With Velox, a single check takes 7.63 seconds on one FPGA, roughly 2x faster than previous implementations, bringing encrypted fraud detection closer to practical deployment.

20x faster confidential stablecoin payments:

Velox enables confidential blockchain transactions to be validated while the transaction details remain encrypted. This makes it possible to process stablecoin payments on public infrastructure without revealing transaction amounts or counterparties, a major unlock for business transactions.

8.5x faster AES transciphering:

Velox also delivers 8.5x faster conversion of data protected with standard encryption, such as AES, into fully homomorphic encryption, making it practical to process sensitive data in the cloud while it remains encrypted. In practice, this means organizations can deploy this technology without changing existing client-side encryption.

Together, these advances make it increasingly feasible to use sensitive data without ever revealing it, unlocking new possibilities across finance and other data-sensitive industries.

(Early) Access

Velox will be available both in the cloud and as an on-premise deployment.

Organizations interested in testing encrypted compute workloads can request early access to the Velox platform.

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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.

Belfort, a new KU Leuven spinoff, launches world’s first Hardware Accelerator for Encrypted Compute and raises $6M to bring it to market:

• Encryption startup Belfort spins out of KU Leuven’s COSIC lab and launches world’s first hardware solution that accelerates encrypted compute, enabling real-time processing of encrypted data without decryption – making privacy-preserving applications commercially viable for the first time
• The $6 million seed funding round is led by Vsquared Ventures, with participation from Anagram and strategic angels including Jeff Dean (Chief Scientist at Google) and Naval Ravikant
• Belfort will use the new funding to double its team and accelerate product, technology, and business development across its San Francisco and Leuven offices

San Francisco / Leuven – September 24, 2025 – Belfort, a KU Leuven spin-off building the future of encrypted compute, today announced the successful close of its $6 million seed funding to bring encrypted data processing into practical, real-time use. The round is led by deep tech specialist Vsquared Ventures, with participation from Anagram, Protocol VC, Inovia Capital, Syndicate One, Prototype, Credibly Neutral and high-profile angel investors including Jeff Dean (Google) and Naval Ravikant. With the new funding, Belfort will grow its team, further improve its technology, support early enterprise pilots, and begin developing its own custom chip.

Urgent need for privacy-preserving computing

When data security fails, the consequences are enormous. In July, it was revealed that a UK Ministry of Defence breach had exposed nearly 19,000 Afghan nationals and intelligence personnel, prompting a £7 billion emergency response. Incidents like this show the urgent need to protect data not just in storage, but during processing. Belfort’s hardware accelerator, the world’s first purpose-built for encrypted compute, makes it possible to compute directly on encrypted data without ever decrypting it, overcoming the speed and cost barriers that long held this field back.

Belfort was spun out of KU Leuven’s world-renowned COSIC lab, from the group of Prof. Ingrid Verbauwhede, a global authority in cryptographic hardware and two-time ERC grant laureate. Co-founders Michiel Van Beirendonck and Furkan Turan, award-winning researchers, developed the technical breakthroughs behind Belfort, and are joined by Laurens De Poorter, former crypto VC at Kraken Ventures and deeptech strategist at Google[x], with substantial experience in operational leadership.

From research breakthrough to real-world applications

“AI is transforming everything, but the infrastructure to keep sensitive data and models secure hasn’t caught up. Encrypted compute is the answer, but without hardware acceleration, it doesn’t scale. The company that cracks that challenge could become the next billion-dollar company.”

Michiel Van Beirendonck, Belfort Co-Founder & CTO

“For decades, we’ve explored how to make computation secure by design. With Belfort, we’re finally bringing those ideas into practice. It’s the first time we’ve seen cryptographic theory translate so directly into usable, real-time systems. It’s a game-changer for anyone who needs to protect sensitive data.”

Prof. Ingrid Verbauwhede, Belfort Co-Founder & Chief Scientist
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The research underpinning Belfort’s core technology was developed over several years, and matured through several grants and research projects including a significant grant by the European Research Council and by the team participating in a competitive U.S. government contract with DARPA.

Herbert Mangesius, Founding Partner at Vsquared Ventures, says: “Belfort's hardware acceleration removes the computational barriers that have long held back encrypted computation, arriving just as digital currencies and the wider digitization of finance, healthcare, and government demand scalable privacy infrastructure. We see Belfort as building the critical layer for fully homomorphic encryption, enabling the move to large-scale practical deployment and turning privacy from a constraint into a competitive advantage.”

Practical deployment and recognition

Unlike traditional security that protects data only at rest or in transit, Belfort enables encrypted data to be processed without exposure to servers, cloud providers, or middlemen with privileged access. Already available today on AWS Marketplace, its hardware can be deployed across healthcare, finance, and government with minimal integration complexity. This makes encrypted compute practical for the first time, powering applications such as fraud detection, genomic analysis, and secure government operations.

Belfort has won Stage Two 2024, Europe’s largest university spin-off competition and was selected as a finalist at Hello Tomorrow 2025, the world’s premier summit for deeptech startups. Additionally, co-founder Prof. Ingrid Verbauwhede was awarded the 2025 FWO Excellence Prize, widely regarded as “the Flemish Nobel Prize,” for lifetime achievement in science and technology.

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 Vsquared

Vsquared Ventures backs bold entrepreneurs engineering groundbreaking technologies addressing some of the world’s most pressing challenges to become global leaders. Investing in deep tech companies, Vsquared Ventures focuses on new space, energy transition, robotics and manufacturing, new computing and sensing, AI and next-gen software and tech-bio. Vsquared Ventures has built one of Europe’s strongest deep tech portfolios, including industry disruptors Isar Aerospace, IQM Quantum Computing, Zama.ai, Neura Robotics, Cylib and The Exploration Company www.vsquared.vc.