Etched has a simple pitch. Nvidia builds chips that do everything. Etched builds chips that do one thing, inference, and claims to do it far better. On Thursday the bet got a lot more money behind it. The startup raised $300 million in a Series C round that values it at $10.3 billion.
Sequoia led the round. Andreessen Horowitz, Jane Street, Diffusion and, tellingly, the memory maker SK Hynix all took part. It is, the company says, the highest valuation ever for a Sequoia-led Series C. Etched has now raised more than $1 billion in total.
The number that stands out is the speed. Etched was worth $5 billion in December. Seven months later it is worth twice that. The startup only emerged from stealth in June, when it revealed a working chip and $1 billion in signed orders.
A chip for one job
Etched started with a contrarian idea. Back in 2022, building a chip tuned for AI models based on the transformer architecture looked, in the words of TechCrunch’s Julie Bort, wild if not wacky. The three founders dropped out of Harvard to try anyway. They are chief executive Gavin Uberti, president Rob Wachen, and chief technology officer Chris Zhu.
