SINGAPORE, Sept. 1, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — 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 core technology to support developer focused decentralised and high grade security for digital assets with functionalities of key management, distributed signature and authorization is built on top of a unique fusion of multi-party computation (MPC), sensing and intelligent signal processing.
The round also included participation from web3 centric funds such as imToken ventures and prominent angels like Daniel Ari Friedman, Mahin Gupta, CK Vishwakarma, Priyeshu Garg, Ashish Tiwari, and more. The startup plans to use this funding to further widen its product offerings towards developer centric decentralised security stack, strengthen its team and scale its go-to-market operations to help enterprises adopt state of the art authentication and authorization techniques.
Silence Laboratories (SL) is on a mission to build a developer focused cryptographic stack and is motivated to democratizing non-trivial libraries. SL has been working closely with several leading players, in the Web 3 ecosystem particularly, to develop the flagship products- Silent Shard and Silent Auth. They are designed to support varied demands of authentication and authorizations with very high degree of contextualization, be it for digital asset custodians with high risks, non-custodial digital wallets, semi-custodial phone based wallets, online exchanges with high expectations on usability, 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.
"Our cryptographic libraries hope to remove several active attack vectors prevalent in the industry today, " said Andrei Bytes, CTO and Co-Founder at Silence Laboratories. "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.
"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," said Shubham Sandeep, MD pi Ventures.
Silence Laboratories is working on setting up an Applied Cryptography and Web3 Security corporate R&D centre in South Asia, with local and international collaborations. The centre 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.
Silence Laboratories is open to collaborators, and enjoys co-development and R&D calls with partners across the Web3 and hybrid Web2 industry. Their DMs on Twitter @SilentAuth are open and they can also be reached out to on info@silencelaboratories.com for a silently authenticated chat.