Nillion today announced it has raised $25 million in a new funding round for its trust-sensitive computation network, which focuses on decentralized networking with an optional blockchain component.

The round was led by Hack VC, with additional support from Distributed Global and Hashkey. Angel investors and strategic contributors from projects including Arbitrum, Worldcoin and Sei also joined in the round. Including a $20 million funding round in December, Nillion has raised more than $50 million.

The startup’s decentralized peer-to-peer decentralized infrastructure provides what it calls “blind computing” for the storage and processing of data without the participants involved revealing its contents. Nillion’s technology allows the data to remain secure and hidden while work is being done, eliminating the need for it to be decrypted ahead of computation. This means that no external party can get a chance to look at the data, enhancing privacy and security.

The company said that’s fundamental for numerous industries such as finance, healthcare and artificial intelligence applications where vast amounts of data are moved and privacy is paramount.

“Nillion was founded three years ago to build a future where high-value data can be secured through decentralization and privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) such as secure multi-party computation (MPC) and homomorphic encryption,” Cointelegraph reported Nillion said.

Although Nillion’s decentralized infrastructure is not blockchain-based, it has formed connections with blockchain partner networks to expand the reach of its decentralized ecosystem. The company has focused on appealing to AI networks where large amounts of data are used for training. Private and secure relationships between AI and data would also provide the foundation for AI services that could work on proprietary information, without the need to access it directly.

The company recently partnered with Ritual to develop a peer-to-peer production network for AI that could process data without revealing its nature. Ritual uses blockchain technology that allows both traditional and blockchain companies to deploy AI models on its infrastructure to execute AI tasks on distributed virtual machines. Nillion has also partnered with the NEAR, Aptos and Arbitrum blockchain networks.

Images: Shutterstock/Nepool, Nillion