Rand Hindi

Rand Hindi is Co-founder and CEO of Zama, an open source cryptography company building Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) solutions for blockchain. Zama's core product, the Confidential Blockchain Protocol, enables confidential smart contracts on any L1 or L2, allowing transaction amounts and on-chain balances to be encrypted while validators continue to execute smart contracts without accessing the underlying data. Hindi's thesis is that the absence of transaction confidentiality is the primary remaining barrier to large-scale institutional use of public blockchains, and that the correct architectural answer is public blockchains with a privacy layer rather than permissioned ledgers. Zama's stated target is to serve as the confidentiality layer for onchain payment volumes, with identified use cases including stablecoin payments, onchain salary settlements, and tokenisation. Hindi has positioned FHE as capable of reaching hundreds of transactions per second today and projecting 100,000+ TPS on dedicated ASICs.

Hindi also serves as a General Partner at Unit Ventures, where he has invested in over 70 companies across cryptography, AI, blockchain, and biotech. Earlier in his career he founded Snips, an edge-based private voice solution for OEMs, which was acquired by Sonos and now powers the voice assistant in over 20 million devices. He was previously a member of the French Digital Council, where he focused on AI and privacy issues, and has served as a lecturer at Sciences Po in Paris. He holds a BSc in Computer Science and a PhD in Bioinformatics from University College London, along with graduate degrees from Singularity University and THNK Amsterdam. He has been named to the MIT Technology Review TR35 and Forbes 30 Under 30.