Etched nearly ran out of cash in 2023 and has since raised $800 million at a $5 billion valuation.
The startup has booked over $1 billion in contracts for Sohu, its transformer-only inference chip.
Peter Thiel, Jane Street and a TSMC-linked fund are betting it can beat Nvidia on inference costs.
In 2023, Etched’s founders could not get investors on the phone. The startup was running out of money, and the AI chip market was fixated on training bigger models, not the unglamorous business of running them once they were built. Two years later, Etched is worth $5 billion.
The company, founded by Harvard dropouts and Thiel Fellows Gavin Uberti and Rob Wachen, has raised $800 million in total and booked more than $1 billion in signed customer contracts for a chip that does one job: run inference, the computation that happens every time someone sends an AI model a prompt and waits for an answer.
