Fortaegis raises $50M Series A to bake security into silicon
Fortaegis has raised a $50M Series A led by Serendipity Capital, with TEL Venture Capital and TNO joining, to put quantum-safe security inside the chip itself from 2027.
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Founded 2023 · Amsterdam, Netherlands
Amsterdam’s Fortaegis has raised a $50 million Series A led by Singapore’s Serendipity Capital to take its quantum-safe Secure Compute platform – encryption generated inside the chip itself, with keys that are never stored – into commercial production from 2027.
We spend a lot of energy worrying about the layers Europe lost – the cloud, the consumer platforms, most of the AI model race. And yet the layer underneath all of them, the silicon that decides whether any of it can be trusted, keeps producing European companies the rest of the world queues up to back. Fortaegis, announced on 14 September, is the latest proof, and the cap table reads like a map of that queue.
A $50 million Series A backed from three continents
Serendipity Capital, the Singapore-based investment firm, led the round. TEL Venture Capital – the venture arm of Tokyo Electron, Japan’s largest maker of chipmaking equipment – joined, alongside Dutch applied-research organisation TNO, Eindhoven’s Prodrive Technologies, NP-Hard Ventures, NovaCapital, Access Ventures and Coalition Capital. Individual investors named in the announcement include Quantinuum founder Ilyas Khan, who chairs Fortaegis, Carlyle’s global head of aerospace, defence and government Ian Fujiyama, and the Oxford historian Peter Frankopan.
The money has one job: production. The company says the round funds commercial manufacturing from 2027, expanded FPGA output, the development of application-specific integrated circuits, and growth of its engineering and commercial teams. Fortaegis was founded in Amsterdam in 2023 by chief executive Boudewijn Wijnands, and holds 17 filed patents with 14 more applications in progress, per its announcement.
Encryption keys that live nowhere
So what did a Singaporean lead, a Japanese CVC and a Dutch research institute all agree on? A simple, physical idea. Fortaegis uses the unique manufacturing variations of each silicon chip to generate cryptographic keys that change constantly and are never written to storage – there is no key vault to raid, because there are no keys at rest. The company describes the architecture as quantum-safe by design and reports secure connections more than 200 times faster than conventional cryptographic protocols in its own and customers’ testing – the company’s figure, not an independent benchmark.
The validation story is unusually concrete for a three-year-old company. TNO, which also invested, subjected the integrated system to aggressive penetration testing and could not break it, according to the announcement. Fortaegis says it is working with more than 25 enterprises and governments across Europe, the US and Asia – among them ASML, Eindhoven University of Technology and NATO military integration exercises – with projects moving from technical validation towards deployment.
“Security cannot remain something we add on top of digital systems – it must become part of the foundations of compute itself,” Wijnands said in the announcement.
A small market compounding at 46% a year
The narrowest segment Fortaegis sells into is post-quantum cryptography, and it is early: $0.42 billion globally in 2025, projected to reach $2.84 billion by 2030 at a 46.2% CAGR (MarketsandMarkets, October 2025). That base is small because the migration has barely started – most of the world’s infrastructure still runs cryptography a future quantum computer could break. The good news is that the spending Fortaegis actually targets is far wider than that label: AI data centres, defence systems, satellites and autonomous machines all need hardware-rooted trust whether or not the quantum threat arrives on schedule.
For scale from our own fundraising data: Arlequin AI’s €28M Series A was one of Europe’s larger defence-adjacent software rounds this month, and Ground A raised €9.1M at pre-seed for laser counter-drone systems just days earlier. A $50 million Series A puts Fortaegis at the top of that September cohort – remarkable for a company whose product ships in volume only from 2027.
Sovereignty is becoming a hardware story
Look at the pattern in this round rather than the amount. Two years ago, European cybersecurity raises were mostly compliance stories – software sold on fear of the next regulation. What we are seeing now is different: capital from Singapore, Tokyo and Eindhoven converging on physics, on the idea that trust has to be manufactured into the chip rather than patched on top. The Netherlands is quietly well placed for that thesis – ASML’s supply chain, TNO’s labs and TU Eindhoven sit within an hour of each other, and Fortaegis has drawn on all three.
The wry footnote: Europe’s most strategic security bet of the month was led from Singapore, not Brussels. The fact remains that the technology, the team and the validation are Dutch, and the production milestone to watch is 2027 – FPGAs first, then ASICs. Watch whether the Fortaegis order book converts governments in the queue into contracts before the first ASIC tapes out. If it does, Europe will have put real silicon under its sovereignty talk. Let’s keep building the stack beneath the stack.
