Leeds-based compute startup Optalysys has partnered with Duality Technologies, a provider of privacy-preserving software, to drive the adoption and application of Fully Homomorphic Encryption technologies (FHE). The partnership aims to make FHE more accessible and commercially viable across various industries, including healthcare and finance.  

Fully Homomorphic Encryption is an advanced, quantum-resilient cryptography method that allows encrypted data to be processed without ever needing to be decrypted or exposed. FHE ensures sensitive or confidential data remains secure when shared over untrusted networks or used in multi-party collaborations – unlocking new opportunities in how data is processed on the cloud.

Historically, scaling FHE has been challenging due to its demand for specialist skills, infrastructure and computing power. The partnership aims to address this challenge by integrating Optalysys’ cloud technology, Explore, into Duality’s software products and the open-source OpenFHE homomorphic encryption software library to accelerate FHE applications for customers. 

Dr Nick New, CEO of Optalysys, commented: “FHE is a truly revolutionary technology that has the power to unlock the true value of data, whilst maintaining privacy and security. Duality is one of the world leaders in privacy-enhancing data collaboration and has an established and successful history working within financial services and government sectors. Currently, the building of FHE models requires a high level of cryptographic expertise.

“We need to get to a point where deployment of FHE is an automated process, part of the fabric of the internet. The development of OpenFHE has been a significant step towards this and allows all the FHE methods to be hosted from a single, open source platform. Our goal is to provide an agnostic acceleration technology to benefit all FHE methods and libraries.”

Dr Kurt Rohloff, Co-founder and CTO of Duality Technologies, added: “Partnering with Optalysys is an exciting step forward in making FHE solutions more accessible and scalable for real-world applications. We both strongly believe in the power of open-source solutions and standards. By integrating Optalysys’ cloud technology with our software products and OpenFHE, we aim to drive transparency and flexibility across the ecosystem, which will enable the wider adoption of FHE.”