Less than a month after it emerged from stealth, inference chip startup Etched has closed a $300 million Series C funding round, led by Sequoia and with participation from SK Hynix, Andreessen Horowitz, Jane Street, and Diffusion.
In an interview with TechCrunch, the startup’s COO Robert Wachen said this most recent round has provided Etched with a $10.3 billion valuation, more than doubling its valuation from December following the close of a $500m funding round.
– Etched
Founded in 2022 by Harvard University dropouts Gavin Uberti and Chris Zhu, the Cupertino-based company announced last month that it had developed a working inference chip and already signed more than $1 billion in customer contracts.
Etched’s chip is comprised of two components designed by the startup from scratch that individually focus on the two phases that make up AI inference: a compute-intensive prompt processing, or ‘prefill,’ stage, and the memory bandwidth-intensive output generation stage, known as ‘decode.’
