Etched, an AI chip startup founded by three Harvard dropouts in 2022, has secured $300 million in Series C funding, bringing its valuation to $10.3 billion. The round was led by Sequoia, with Andreessen Horowitz, SK Hynix, Jane Street, and Diffusion Capital also participating. Other backers include Peter Thiel, Andrej Karpathy, Dylan Field, and Amjad Masad. Etched previously valued at $5 billion in December, meaning it has doubled its valuation in about seven months. This is the highest valuation ever for a Sequoia-led Series C, according to co-founder and COO Robert Wachen.
Etched announced that it successfully manufactured its homegrown chips, with its first full systems being tested by clients and $1 billion in orders booked. The company launched in a period when building AI-specific chips was seen as unconventional. Wachen explained that while some doubt remains about the versatility of its systems, they can run any AI model, including Mixture of Experts models like DeepSeek and Qwen, as well as non-transformer designs like Mamba. The startup also mentioned that Google is reportedly pursuing a similar concept with its Frozen v2 chip for Gemini.
Etched’s success is attributed to its innovative design of two new components to speed up inference. The company created a prefill chip that runs at a much lower voltage, enabling faster performance and reduced heat. For the decode phase, Etched developed a new type of memory and interconnect technology called cluster scale memory, allowing multiple chips to share memory at low latency. The result is high speeds with lower costs. Wachen noted that the startup faced skepticism due to limited access to its systems, which were initially shown only to investors and early customers. Source: techcrunch
