Niobium

Niobium is a semiconductor and cloud infrastructure company focused on hardware acceleration for fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). Founded in 2021 as a spinout from Galois, Inc., the company is headquartered in Dayton, Ohio, with additional offices in Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco, California. The company's core product is the mistic™ FHE Accelerator, a purpose-built ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) designed to enable computation on encrypted data without requiring decryption. Niobium has partnered with SEMIFIVE and Samsung Foundry for the manufacturing of this chip. As of 2026, the mistic™ Core architecture runs on FPGA, with the ASIC version in development. Niobium is also developing The Niobium Fog™, an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform purpose-built for FHE workloads. A developer partner program for The Fog was opened in mid-2026, giving early partners hands-on access to accelerated FHE compute ahead of a broader Q3 2026 launch. In addition to hardware, the company is building higher-level software frameworks intended to make encrypted computing accessible to a broader developer audience, drawing a parallel to how NVIDIA's CUDA platform democratized GPU-accelerated computing. Target markets include industries that handle sensitive data in cloud environments, such as healthcare, financial services, government, and AI. The company's value proposition centers on allowing organizations to process data in the cloud without ever exposing it in decrypted form, addressing privacy and regulatory compliance requirements.