TL;DRAI chip startup Etched has raised $800M backed by Jane Street and a TSMC-linked fund, with one billion dollars in sales contracts and summer shipments planned.
AI chip startup Etched has raised $800 million and revealed that its backers include trading firm Jane Street and VentureTech Alliance, a venture firm with a strategic partnership with TSMC. The company, which designs chips specifically for running AI models rather than training them, says it has signed one billion dollars in sales contracts and plans to start shipping to customers this summer.
The bulk of the funding came from a $500 million round led by Stripes that closed in December, valuing Etched at five billion dollars. That round included Peter Thiel, Positive Sum, Ribbit Capital, Hudson River Trading, and Two Sigma. Jane Street separately led a previously unannounced round and has invested more than $100 million in total, according to Bloomberg.
The investor list reads like a who’s who of AI. Geoffrey Hinton, who won a Nobel Prize for foundational work in modern AI, is an investor. So are computer vision pioneer Fei-Fei Li and hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller.
Founded in 2022 by Harvard dropouts Gavin Uberti and Robert Wachen, Etched has been quiet for roughly two years while building its product. The company’s chip, called Sohu, is designed to run transformer models by embedding the architecture directly into silicon rather than relying on general-purpose GPUs. Working with TSMC, Etched developed what it calls low-voltage inference, running chips at lower voltage to prevent overheating and squeeze more performance from the hardware.
