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.’.
According to Etched, its chip runs at a “much lower voltage than any other AI chip,” meaning it generates less heat and can therefore house more transistors. The hardware also utilizes an architecture that creates a shared low-latency memory pool across the entire scale-up domain, the company said, adding that its proprietary ultra-low-latency, high-bandwidth interconnect enables “dramatically faster” memory access across chips..
The chip was produced on TSMC’s N4P process technology, and the company is now validating its rack-scale product with customers, with plans to ship its first racks this summer.. At present, Etched employs around 400 people at its San Jose, California, office, operating a 2MW data center at the site.
Per the TechCrunch report, the startup has also just opened a new 80,000 square-foot (7,432 sqm), 10MW facility in Milpitas, to the north of San Jose.. More in IT Hardware & Semiconductors. 03 Jul 2026.
30 Mar 2026. More in North America. 11 Feb 2026.
14 Jul 2026
