Alibaba's Ant Financial and US Insurance Giant Invest In Israeli Blockchain Startup QEDIT

• Alibaba-affiliated Ant Financial, RGA accelerator, among QEDIT’s series A investors.
• The $10 million investment round was led by Tel Aviv-based MizMaa Ventures.
• Founded in 2016, QEDIT develops a privacy layer for enterprise blockchain networks, using zero-knowledge proof cryptography.
• Among QEDIT advisors is coinventor of zero-knowledge proof cryptography, Professor Shafi Goldwasser
• QEDIT partners with Ant Financial, Dell Technologies subsidiary VMware, and Reinsurance Group of America accelerator RGAX.

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba’s affiliate company, Ant Financial, is among those to have participated in QEDIT’s $10 million series A investment round. QEDIT, an Israeli blockchain technology startup specializing in zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP), plans to use the new capital to continue developing its privacy protocol, expand its sales team, and attract new partners.

Announced on Tuesday in a blog post, Ant Financial invested in QEDIT’s series A round alongside lead investor MizMaa Ventures, as well as Reinsurance Group of America accelerator (RGAX), Meron Capital, Collider Ventures, Target Global, and venture capital firm Jonovo.

The $10 million raised by QEDIT now means the enterprise-oriented blockchain startup has secured $14 million worth of investments and grants since it was founded by three serial tech entrepreneurs – Jonathan Rouach (CEO), Dr. Aviv Zohar (Chief Scientist), and Ruben Arnold (CFO) – in 2016.

QEDIT Devoted to ZKPs for Enterprise Blockchain

For the foreseeable future, QEDIT plans to focus entirely on the enterprise blockchain space. Their ZKP-based privacy solution – which is adaptable to Ethereum, Corda, Quorum, Hyperledger, Stellar, or any other blockchain stack – serves “as a trust accelerator among companies that wish to collaborate on data that cannot be shared,” per Tuesday’s announcement.

QEDIT also announced a partnership with two of its investors – Ant Financial and RGAX – as well as VMware, a software virtualization company that counts tech behemoth Dell Technologies as its majority shareholder.

By partnering with QEDIT, each of the three large-scale multinational corporations will take to implementing data privacy solutions on their respective blockchain networks. In a quote accompanying Tuesday’s blog post, Rouach commented that “working with VMware, Ant Financial and RGAX will help [QEDIT] showcase the value that Zero-Knowledge Proof cryptography can offer on an enterprise level, across different industry verticals.”