Etched Hits $10.3 Billion Valuation With Specialized Inference Hardware

AI chip startup Etched has closed a $300 million Series C funding round, bringing its valuation to $10.3 billion, according to co-founder and COO Robert Wachen. As reported by TechCrunch, the round was led by Sequoia, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, SK Hynix, Jane Street, Diffusion Capital, and other early investors. The company's backers also include Peter Thiel, Andrej Karpathy, Dylan Field, and Amjad Masad.

Founded in 2022 by Harvard dropouts CEO Gavin Uberti, Wachen, and CTO Chris Zhu, Etched is developing full systems designed to optimize the inference process. Wachen told TechCrunch that the company developed two specific components to increase speed and lower costs: a prefill chip that utilizes "low-voltage inference" to reduce heat and increase transistor density, and a "cluster-scale memory" interconnect technology that allows multiple chips to share a memory pool with low latency.

While some skeptics suggest the hardware is limited to specific LLMs, Wachen clarifies that the systems can run various architectures, including Mamba state-space models and Mixture of Experts models such as Qwen and DeepSeek.

Etched recently announced that TSMC has successfully manufactured its chips and the company has booked $1 billion in orders. To support growth, Etched has expanded its infrastructure, opening a 10MW, 80,000-square-foot facility in Milpitas to complement its 2 megawatt data center in San Jose. Wachen noted that early hardware demos have been reviewed by industry figures including Geoffrey Hinton, Noam Brown of OpenAI, and Andrej Karpathy of Anthropic.