Belfort

Belfort is a spin-off from KU Leuven's COSIC lab that builds hardware accelerators and software tools for encrypted computing, specifically Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE). Their core product, Velox, is an FPGA-based accelerator that runs TFHE workloads, and it integrates with frameworks like Google HEIR and TFHE-rs.

The company's core value proposition is making FHE practical. FHE allows computations to run directly on encrypted data, eliminating the need to decrypt sensitive information during processing—a major security vulnerability in traditional systems. However, FHE has historically been too slow for real-world use. Belfort addresses this by combining specialized hardware with compiler-friendly software to close the performance gap.

The market pain point is clear: today's cloud infrastructure requires data to be decrypted before processing, exposing it at the most critical moment. This affects finance (fraud detection, sanction screening), blockchain (confidential transactions), and any industry handling sensitive data. Belfort's solution enables these workloads to run while data stays encrypted end-to-end.

In the past six months (March to September 2026), Belfort has made several notable advances. In March, they launched Velox, achieving over 3x performance improvement over their previous generation, with native multi-FPGA support. Later that month, Google became their first paying customer, with Google developing the HEIR compiler to simplify FHE development. In collaboration with SWIFT, they demonstrated encrypted fraud detection running 2x faster, and they showed 20x faster confidential stablecoin payments and 8.5x faster AES transciphering. These milestones indicate the technology is moving from research toward production deployment.