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§ Private Profile · 100 Van Ness Ave, San Francisco, California, United States
NuCypher is a technology company.
NuCypher has raised $15.4M across 3 funding rounds.
Key people at NuCypher.
NuCypher was founded in 2015 by MacLane Wilkison (Founder/CEO).
NuCypher has raised $15.4M in total across 3 funding rounds.
NuCypher developed a privacy layer for decentralized applications, focusing on secure data handling and access control within distributed systems. Its core technology leveraged proxy re-encryption (PRE) and threshold cryptography, enabling conditional access to encrypted data. This infrastructure provided developers with tools to manage sensitive information securely across public blockchains.
Founded in 2015 by MacLane Wilkison and Michael Egorov, the company emerged from an insight into the critical need for robust data privacy and access control in the nascent blockchain space. Wilkison and Egorov, experts in cybersecurity and distributed systems, focused on solving fundamental challenges of confidential data management in transparent environments.
NuCypher's solutions were adopted by developers integrating privacy-preserving capabilities into decentralized applications. The firm's technology now underpins key aspects of the Threshold Network, formed through its merger with Keep Network. This unified entity advances a vision of creating foundational privacy infrastructure, empowering decentralized finance and Web3 applications with secure data interactions.
Key people at NuCypher.
NuCypher was founded in 2015 by MacLane Wilkison (Founder/CEO).
NuCypher has raised $15.4M in total across 3 funding rounds.
NuCypher's investors include Polychain Capital, Arrington XRP Capital, Bitfury, Bitmain, CoinFund, Danhua Capital, Hashed, Metamorphic Ventures, Notation Capital, Y Combinator, 360 Capital Partners, Abstract Ventures.
NuCypher has raised $15.4M across 3 funding rounds. Most recently, it raised $10.7M Other Equity in October 2019.
# NuCypher: A Privacy Infrastructure Layer for Blockchain
NuCypher is a decentralized encryption and key management platform that provides a privacy and security layer for decentralized applications built on public blockchains, primarily Ethereum.[1] Rather than building a standalone blockchain or consumer-facing product, NuCypher serves as critical infrastructure for developers who need to securely store, share, and manage sensitive data within decentralized systems.
The platform addresses a fundamental problem in blockchain development: public blockchains are transparent by design, making it difficult to handle confidential information. NuCypher solves this by offering secrets management (storing sensitive data like passwords and private keys) and dynamic access control (conditionally granting and revoking access to encrypted data).[1] The network operates through a distributed set of nodes called Ursula that perform encryption services, incentivized by the NU token, which users stake to participate in the network and earn rewards for providing key management services.[1][2]
NuCypher was founded in 2015 in San Francisco by MacLane Wilkison and Michael Egorov, who initially aimed to help users securely transact data with cloud providers.[1] Wilkison, a former investment banker at Morgan Stanley, and Egorov, a security researcher and physicist from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, pivoted their focus in 2017 to apply their encryption technology to smart contracts and blockchain applications.[1][4]
The company raised $750,000 in a private seed round and over $15 million through Simple Agreement for Future Token (SAFT) pre-sales, demonstrating early investor confidence in their cryptographic approach.[1] A pivotal moment came in June 2020 when NuCypher transitioned from a traditional corporate structure to a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), transferring governance power to users and token holders.[1] The platform's mainnet officially launched on October 15, 2020, enabling token holders to stake their NU and participate in the network.[3]
NuCypher operates at the intersection of two critical trends: the explosion of data breaches in sensitive sectors (healthcare saw an 80% increase in breaches from 2017 to 2019) and the growing adoption of decentralized applications that require privacy guarantees.[3] As enterprises and developers increasingly build on public blockchains, the need for a trusted privacy layer has become essential—NuCypher fills this gap by providing infrastructure that wasn't previously available.
The platform influences the broader ecosystem by enabling use cases that were previously impossible on public blockchains: confidential healthcare records, encrypted financial data, and proprietary business information can now be managed on decentralized networks without exposing sensitive details. This expands blockchain's addressable market beyond financial transactions to enterprise and institutional applications where privacy is non-negotiable.
NuCypher's transition to a DAO governance model positions it as a community-owned privacy infrastructure, aligning with broader trends toward decentralized governance in crypto. As blockchain adoption accelerates in regulated industries like healthcare and finance, demand for privacy layers will likely intensify. The platform's success depends on developer adoption—whether dApps and protocols integrate NuCypher's services into their workflows—and on maintaining the security and availability of its node network.
The company's influence will likely grow as privacy becomes a competitive necessity rather than a nice-to-have feature in blockchain applications. NuCypher's role as foundational infrastructure means its success is tied to the broader maturation of the decentralized web, making it a bellwether for whether blockchain can truly serve enterprise use cases that demand confidentiality.
