Alibaba's Ant Financial Backs $10 Million Round for Blockchain Privacy Startup

QEDIT, a developer of privacy technology for enterprise blockchains, has closed a $10 million Series A round from investors including Ant Financial, the payments affiliate of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba.

Ant Financial will also be incorporating QEDIT's zero-knowledge proof tech into its blockchain projects, the companies announced Tuesday.

QEDIT's investment round was led by MizMaa Ventures, with participation from Ant Financial and RGAX as well as Meron Capital, Collider Ventures, Jovono and Target Global.

QEDIT has received a total of $14 million in funding to date, comprising the A round, a previous $3 million seed round and $1 million in grants.

"Ant Financial shares a common vision with QEDIT to protect data privacy and security. Robust privacy measures are critical to the ongoing development of the wider finance sector. Together with QEDIT, Ant Financial is committed to providing such capabilities as part of our blockchain services."

"We have been getting our product out to large providers in Asia and one of them is Ant Financial, the largest fintech in the world. So our product is compatible with the Ant Financial blockchain offering."

He pointed out that Ant Financial has launched production blockchain efforts and is very familiar with the need for privacy when moving assets around.

QEDIT has demonstrated on the public ethereum blockchain how to prove an individual falls within a certain tax bracket without access to the fundamental data, Rouach said.

Outlining how QEDIT's zero knowledge tech could be used by the likes of Ant Financial and VMware, Rouach said when a network operates across multiple cloud environments, ZKP solutions allow cloud deployment of blockchain without revealing any sensitive information outside of your chosen cloud provider.

"We are increasingly seeing industries employing enterprise blockchain as their collaboration backbone, where competitors are joining the same network. Our integration to enterprise blockchain stacks from Ant Financial and VMware lets clients pick a Blockchain-as-a-Service provider and have QEDIT's privacy layer solution included by default," he said.