Aztec raised $100 million from a16z and other investors

London-based startup Aztec Network has closed a $100 million Series B funding round.

The investment round was led by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz with the participation of A_Capital, King River Capital, HashKey Capital, Fenbushi Capital, Variant, SV Angel and Alumni Ventures.

Aztec will use the funds raised to expand the team from 40 to 80 people and develop an encrypted architecture for using blockchains without disclosing user-identifying information.

"At a high level, Aztec is an encrypted version of Ethereum. Usually everything is public on Ethereum, but we do it encrypted. This path took us many years," said Joe Andrews, co—founder of the startup.

The standard being developed by Aztec called PLONK makes possible a two-tier transaction processing system. The solution provides cheaper transfers (up to 100 times compared to Ethereum) and "verifiable confidentiality", hiding the sender's, recipient's and amount data.

Recall that in December 2021, Aztec raised $17 million from Paradigm and other investors.