ZeroRISC, a silicon supply chain integrity solutions provider specialising in open-source silicon, has closed a $10m seed funding round to accelerate the commercial adoption of its technology.
The funding round was led by Fontinalis Partners. Other participants included Fundomo, Analog Devices co-founder Ray Stata, SemiAnalysis founder Dylan Patel, SBXi, Chelpis, Bond Street LLC, and several existing angel investors.
Founded in April 2023 by Dominic Rizzo, ZeroRISC builds on the OpenTitan project, which Rizzo launched in 2019. OpenTitan became the first open-source silicon root of trust and remains the only open-source chip to achieve broad commercial deployment.
ZeroRISC focuses on expanding access to production-grade, OpenTitan-based designs for applications ranging from IoT devices to datacentres. Its platform allows seamless integration into system-on-chips, chiplets, and other devices, offering universal silicon security across the supply chain. Central to its offering is the Integrity Management Platform (IMP), which decouples device security from the place of manufacture, shifting control to device owners who can set security policies according to their operational requirements.
With the fresh capital, ZeroRISC aims to accelerate its commercial roll-out, bringing its open-source, secure-by-design silicon to a broader base of enterprise customers. The company’s platform delivers ‘big tech’-level security features across the supply chain, helping customers move away from opaque hardware and towards fully transparent and verifiable solutions.
ZeroRISC’s approach integrates security from the chip design stage through manufacturing, starting protection beneath the operating system. This aims to defend against hardware and firmware attacks as well as software vulnerabilities. As regulatory bodies push more liability onto manufacturers and cyber insurance premiums continue to rise—projected to hit $23bn by 2026—the company’s solution offers CISOs the ability to fully control which software runs on their devices.
The seed round has attracted support from prominent industry figures. Analog Devices co-founder Ray Stata said, “ZeroRISC is making truly trustworthy supply chain security accessible to every organization and end customer, not just those with specialized hardware or significant budgets. This is a massive shift.” Fundomo investor Rajeev Surati added, “ZeroRISC will become a foundational requirement for future systems essential for combating AI deepfakes and similar threats by ensuring end-to-end attestation, from real sensor data capture to the verified AI model and prompt used to generate outputs.”
Fontinalis partner Gabe Cunningham said, “ZeroRISC is executing on a classic Silicon Valley playbook – the founder of an open-source project launches a startup to bring the technology to a broader universe of enterprise customers. Commercial open silicon can enable a new generation of secure-by-default devices.”
Read the full RegTech Analyst post here.
Source: https://fintech.global/
