Etched

AI Chips · Semiconductors · AI Infrastructure

Funding

Etched raises $300M Series C at $10.3B valuation, led by Sequoia

The startup's valuation has doubled in just seven months, fueled by more than $1 billion in pre-orders for GPU-free AI chips.

• Etched closed a $300 million Series C at a $10.3 billion valuation, led by Sequoia Capital with Andreessen Horowitz, Jane Street, SK Hynix, and Diffusion Capital participating.
• Founded in 2022 by three Harvard dropouts, Etched builds transformer-specific inference chips and sells them as complete rack-scale systems meant to replace GPUs for running AI models.
• The $10.3 billion price tag doubles Etched's valuation from the $5 billion mark set in a $500 million round just seven months earlier, in December.
• Etched has booked roughly $1 billion in customer pre-orders, grown to about 400 employees, and opened an 80,000-square-foot California facility plus a Taiwan factory to scale production.
• Its Sohu chip, built on TSMC's 4nm process, is designed specifically for transformer inference and is claimed to run roughly 20x faster than Nvidia's H100 on that workload.
• Etched says its systems can also run Mixture-of-Experts models like DeepSeek and Qwen and non-transformer designs like Mamba, countering claims that its hardware only works with one specific model.
• The round shows top-tier investors betting that purpose-built inference silicon can carve out a real alternative to Nvidia as AI workloads shift from training to serving models at scale.