AI chip startup Etched closed a $300 million Series C at a $10.3 billion valuation, doubling its worth in seven months and landing what the company calls the highest valuation ever for a Sequoia-led Series C. Sequoia led the round with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, SK Hynix, Jane Street, and Diffusion Capital.
Founded in 2022 by three Harvard dropouts, Etched has battled skepticism since day one. The startup builds custom chips designed specifically for AI inference, splitting the workload into two novel components: a prefill chip that runs at dramatically lower voltage to pack in more transistors, and a cluster-scale memory system for the decode phase that links chips through a shared, low-latency memory pool.
The company announced last month that it had successfully manufactured its first chips at TSMC, shipped full rack systems to early customers, and booked $1 billion in orders. Early testers include AI researchers Andrej Karpathy and Geoffrey Hinton.
Investor Peter Thiel and ex-OpenAI board member Andrej Karpathy are among the company’s backers. The rapid valuation leap from $5 billion to $10.3 billion signals growing market confidence that specialized inference silicon can challenge Nvidia’s GPU dominance.
