Silence Laboratories, a web3 focused cybersecurity startup, headquartered in Singapore and working on libraries for MPC and Proofs-based Decentralised Security-as-Service (DSaaS), has closed a $1.7 million round in a seed funding, led by Pi Ventures.
Their fundamental technology, which supports developer-focused decentralized and high-grade security for digital assets through key management, distributed signature, and authorization, is built on a unique fusion of multi-party computation (MPC), sensing, and intelligent signal processing.
Web3 centric funds like imToken Ventures also participated, as did famous angels like Daniel Ari Friedman, Mahin Gupta, CK Vishwakarma, Priyeshu Garg, Ashish Tiwari, and others. The startup intends to use this capital to broaden its product offerings toward a developer-centric decentralized security stack, improve its workforce, and scale its go-to-market operations to assist enterprises in adopting cutting-edge authentication and authorization methodologies.
Silence Laboratories (SL) is on a mission to build a developer-focused cryptographic stack, with the goal of democratizing non-trivial libraries. SL has collaborated extensively with various key partners, particularly in the Web 3 ecosystem, to develop its main products, Silent Shard and Silent Auth. They are intended to support a wide range of authentication and authorization demands with a high degree of contextualization, whether for high-risk digital asset custodians, non-custodial digital wallets, semi-custodial phone-based wallets, online exchanges with high usability expectations, or web3-centric cloud service providers.
“Account takeover due to single point of failures of the private keys is on unparalleled rise and have been affecting enterprises and different sectors of Web3 businesses. Hence, the internet is witnessing a growing push towards distributed authentication protocols and signature schemes and Silence Laboratories is at the forefront of this revolution,” says Jay Prakash, CEO and Co-Founder at Silence Laboratories. Wallet cloning, browser wallet extension hacks, phished DEX and CEX websites are all compromised examples of bad authentication practices in Web3. “We want Web3 folks to talk to us about fixing this. We’re happy to make custom collaborations as needed, but we must do this together, as an industry”, he said.
Andrei Bytes, CTO and Co-Founder, Silence Laboratories, said, “Our cryptographic libraries hope to remove several active attack vectors prevalent in the industry today. In our pursuit to facilitate easier adoption of our libraries and helping enterprises develop together, we recently joined premier global alliances such MPC alliance and Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF).”
“Among others, SL’s team integrated Silent Shard with MetaMask’s Snaps which in itself is a great example of how MetaMask has opened the wallet design ecosystem. The Snap based designs will help to enhance wallet security and set benchmarks for MPC based wallets,” says Jay Prakash.
Shubham Sandeep, MD, Pi Ventures, said, “Issues with private key management have led to loss of Billions of dollars in 2022 alone. The holy trifecta of ironclad security, great user experience and developer-friendliness for Web 3 is yet to be cracked and we believe the team at Silence Laboratories is best placed to solve this. Jay and Andrei bring complementary skill sets and the early tractions are testament to their innovative solutions. We’ve been extremely impressed by the team at Silence Laboratories and are excited to back them in these times of constant hacks.”
Silence Laboratories is working on setting up an Applied Cryptography and Web3 Security corporate R&D center in South Asia, with local and international collaborations. The center will attract some of the best talents globally to contribute in solving niche problems in usable security and MPC algorithms and set the backbone for several upcoming businesses and products.
