AI chip startup Etched Inc. has raised $300 million in a Series C funding round led by Sequoia Capital, doubling its valuation to $10.3 billion. Founded by Harvard dropouts, the company designs specialized hardware optimized exclusively for AI inference rather than general-purpose workloads. Etched has already booked over $1 billion in orders and manufactured its first chips through TSMC. The startup aims to challenge Nvidia's dominance in the AI compute market with its low-voltage inference and cluster-scale memory technologies.
Etched Series C funding round
- ▪Etched Inc. stated that its financing represents the highest valuation ever achieved for a Sequoia Capital-led Series C funding round
- ▪The Series C funding round for Etched Inc. included participation from SK Hynix Inc., Andreessen Horowitz, Jane Street, and Diffusion Capital
- ▪Etched Inc. more than doubled its valuation to $10.3 billion from a $5 billion valuation in December 2025
- ▪Etched Inc. raised $300 million in a Series C funding round led by Sequoia Capital, valuing the startup at $10.3 billion
Specialized AI chip architecture
- ▪Etched Inc. says its chips use low-voltage inference to lower processor voltage and temperature, enabling higher clock frequencies than traditional graphics processing units
- ▪Etched Inc. designs specialized chips optimized exclusively for AI inference, which is the process of running trained artificial intelligence models
- ▪Etched Inc. says it developed cluster-scale memory technology that allows multiple accelerators in a rack to share a single memory pool at low latency
- ▪According to Etched co-founder Robert Wachen, the company's hardware systems can run various AI architectures, including Mixture of Experts models like DeepSeek and state-space models like Mamba
Manufacturing progress
- ▪Etched Inc. opened an 80,000-square-foot facility near its San Jose, California headquarters to expand production and prototyping
- ▪Etched Inc. plans to begin shipping its first hardware racks in the summer of 2026
- ▪Etched Inc.'s custom silicon chips are manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company
Customer order volume
- ▪Etched Inc. has booked over $1 billion in orders for its specialized AI hardware systems
- ▪Etched Inc. stated that customer demand for its AI inference systems continues to outpace supply as clients transition to deployment
Investor validation process
- ▪Etched Inc. secured backing from prominent investors by conducting private hardware demonstrations in its office
- ▪According to Etched co-founder Robert Wachen, Andrej Karpathy, Noam Brown, and Geoffrey Hinton tested the company's hardware firsthand
AI hardware market shift
- ▪Google is reportedly pursuing a similar concept with its Frozen v2 chip for Gemini
- ▪Etched Inc. is among a growing number of startups seeking to challenge Nvidia Corporation's dominance in the AI chip market
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