The foundations of cybersecurity startup Silence Laboratories are rooted in research. Its products are built on ideas that emerged from the doctoral research of each of its founders.

“One of our earliest products lived in the audio space. We worked on the fusion of sound waves and radio frequency (RF) waves for proximity-based verification,” says CEO Jay Prakash. “The idea was to use sound and wireless signals to confirm that a login device and a token device are physically close to each other when authentication is approved.”

That early work with silent, inaudible signals gave the startup its name. As the company expanded beyond audio into a broader suite of privacy-enhancing and cryptographic products, the name stayed.

Today, Silence Laboratories is a cryptography company focused on building cryptographic privacy-enhancing technologies.

“Our products empower organisations to compute on encrypted and distributed data sources, without ever exposing the data to any of the parties involved,” Prakash says.

Along with Prakash, the Palo Alto-based startup was founded by CTO Andrei Bytes and CSO Tony Quek. Its 30-member team is spread across 14 countries and includes former leaders from VMware, Snap, A.T. Kearney, and Oracle.

Collectively, the founders bring more than 40 years of cybersecurity experience. Prakash says the team’s research background is reflected in more than 10 Tier-1 publications and collaborations with Microsoft and IISc.

The startup recently won the Accenture Tech Next Challenge 2026 in the cybersecurity category. Prakash says the win validated the team’s technology and the growing market need for privacy-preserving data collaboration.

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