Etched, the AI chip startup founded by three Harvard dropouts, has closed a $300 million Series C round at a $10.3 billion valuation. The round was led by Sequoia, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, SK Hynix, and Jane Street.
The company designs custom chips and memory components that accelerate AI inference without relying on Nvidia’s GPUs. Etched’s systems handle both the prefill and decode phases of inference using specialized silicon, running at lower voltages and leveraging cluster-scale shared memory for fast performance at lower cost.
Etched has already booked $1 billion in orders and successfully manufactured its first chips through TSMC. The startup previously raised $500 million at a $5 billion valuation in December. Early backers include Peter Thiel, Andrej Karpathy, and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. The company faces skepticism from those who doubted its transformer-specific chip approach, but co-founder Robert Wachen says the systems work with any AI model, including Mixture of Experts and state-space architectures.
