AI chip startup Etched defies skeptics, hits $10.3B valuation from big-name investors
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- Etched closed a $300 million Series C at a $10.3 billion valuation led by Sequoia, with Andreessen Horowitz, SK Hynix, Jane Street, and Diffusion Capital also participating alongside individual backers Peter Thiel, Andrej Karpathy, Dylan Field, and Amjad Masad.
- The $10.3 billion valuation is double Etched's $5 billion December mark from a prior $500 million round and is the highest ever for a Sequoia-led Series C.
- Etched manufactured its first chips via TSMC, has first full systems being tested by clients, and has booked $1 billion in orders — all announced last month.
- COO Robert Wachen told TechCrunch that despite public perception, Etched's systems run any AI model including Mixture of Experts designs like DeepSeek and Qwen, plus non-transformer architectures like Mamba.
- Etched built two custom components: a prefill chip running at much lower voltage than competitors ("low-voltage inference") and a new memory/interconnect system called "cluster scale memory" for the decode phase.
- Co-founders Gavin Uberti, Wachen, and CTO Chris Zhu dropped out of Harvard in 2022; Etched now employs 400 people and operates a 2 megawatt data center running tokens with "some of the largest AI companies in the world."
- Google is reportedly pursuing the same concept of baking parts of a specific AI model directly into silicon with its Frozen v2 chip for Gemini, per the report.
Why it matters: Etched's $1 billion in booked orders before mass production signals genuine customer pull rather than hype, but the company remains untested at scale and faces direct competition from Google's parallel Frozen v2 effort on the same model-baked-into-silicon concept. A Sequoia-led record Series C at this stage raises the bar for AI inference challengers eyeing Nvidia's economics.
