AI chip startup Etched doubles valuation to $10.3B, raises $300M to challenge Nvidia
8 Sources
[1]
AI chip startup Etched defies skeptics, hits $10.3B valuation from big-name investors
Etched, the AI chip startup founded by three Harvard dropouts in 2022, has closed a $300 million Series C funding round at a $10.3 billion valuation, co-founder and COO Robert Wachen tells TechCrunch. The round was led by Sequoia, with Andreessen Horowitz, SK Hynix, Jane Street, and Diffusion
[2]
AI chip startup Etched raises $300 million at $10.3 billion valuation
July 23 (Reuters) - Sequoia-backed Etched said on Thursday it raised $300 million in a Series C funding round that valued the AI chip company at $10.3 billion. Etched is among a growing number of startups seeking to challenge Nvidia's dominance in AI chips by developing hardware for inference,
[3]
Etched raises $300M at a $10.3B valuation, SK Hynix in
Etched, the chip startup three Harvard dropouts founded in 2022, has raised $300M at a $10.3bn valuation. It has doubled its worth in seven months, drawn in the memory giant SK Hynix, and set out to beat Nvidia at the one job that matters most: running AI models. Etched has a simple pitch. Nvidia
[4]
AI chip startup Etched more than doubles valuation to $10.3B in new $300M round
Etched Inc., a startup with a chip optimized for artificial intelligence inference, today announced that it has raised $300 million in funding. The Series C round was led by Sequoia. SK Hynix Inc., the world's largest supplier of memory for AI chips, participated as well alongside Andreessen
[5]
AI chip startup Etched raises $300 million at $10.3 billion valuation
Etched secured three hundred million dollars in a Series C funding round. This investment values the artificial intelligence chip company at ten point three billion dollars. Sequoia led the funding round with several other prominent investors participating. The company plans to use these funds to
[6]
Nvidia's New AI Rival Could Reportedly Be Worth $20 Billion - NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA), Cerebras Systems (NAS
Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) rival AI chip startup Etched is reportedly in talks to raise funds at roughly a $20 billion valuation, quadrupling its prior mark. Existing backer Jane Street is spearheading the new financing, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing sources. Separately, Etched is
[7]
AI Chip Startup Etched Eyes $20 Billion Valuation | PYMNTS.com
As The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Friday (July 17), sources familiar with the matter say the company is capitalizing on a soaring market for venture capital investments in AI startups, and is also raising capital at a $10 billion valuation in a separate round led by Sequoia Capital. WSJ
[8]
Etched seeks $20 billion valuation in new AI chip funding round - WSJ reports By Investing.com
Investing.com -- Artificial intelligence chip startup Etched is in talks to raise capital at a valuation of about $20 billion, quadrupling its previous valuation as investors seek alternatives to Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA), The Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the
Share
Copy Link
Etched, founded by three Harvard dropouts in 2022, has closed a $300 million Series C funding round at a $10.3 billion valuation—doubling its worth in just seven months. Led by Sequoia with participation from SK Hynix and Andreessen Horowitz, the AI chip startup is building specialized hardware for inference to challenge Nvidia's dominance with custom chips designed for low-voltage operation and cluster-scale memory.
Etched Raises $300 Million, Doubles Valuation in Seven Months
Etched, the AI chip startup founded by three Harvard dropouts in 2022, has closed a $300 million Series C funding round at a $10.3 billion valuation, more than doubling its worth from $5 billion in December
1
. The round was led by Sequoia, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, SK Hynix, Jane Street, and Diffusion Capital2
. According to Etched, this represents the highest Etched valuation ever for a Sequoia-led Series C5
. The company has now raised more than $1 billion in total funding, backed by notable investors including Peter Thiel, Andrej Karpathy, Dylan Field, and Amjad Masad1
.
Source: Benzinga
Specialized Hardware for Inference Takes Center Stage
Etched is among a growing number of startups seeking to challenge Nvidia's dominance in AI chips by developing specialized hardware for inference—the process of running artificial intelligence models after training
2
. While Nvidia builds chips that handle both training and AI inference workloads, Etched focuses exclusively on AI model inference, claiming to deliver superior performance for this specific use case3
. The company's founders—CEO Gavin Uberti, COO Robert Wachen, and CTO Chris Zhu—dropped out of Harvard to pursue what was initially considered a contrarian idea: building chips optimized for transformer-based models, the architecture behind ChatGPT and Claude1
.
Source: SiliconANGLE
Two Breakthrough Technologies Power AI Hardware Innovation
Etched's approach to AI inference centers on two custom-designed components that address different bottlenecks in the computing process. The first innovation involves low-voltage operation for the prefill phase, which handles prompt understanding and context processing
4
. By running at much lower voltage than traditional AI chips, Etched generates less heat, allowing the chip to pack in more transistors and operate at higher clock frequencies1
. The second breakthrough is cluster-scale memory, a proprietary interconnect technology that enables multiple chips to share a memory pool at very low latency during the decode phase, when models generate output tokens4
. The involvement of SK Hynix, the world's largest supplier of memory for AI chips, signals strong industry confidence in Etched's memory architecture3
.Related Stories
From Skepticism to $1 Billion in Orders
The AI chip startup faced considerable skepticism when it launched, with critics assuming its systems could only run specific large language models
1
. Wachen clarifies that Etched's systems are architecture-agnostic, capable of running mixture-of-experts models like DeepSeek and Qwen, as well as non-transformer designs like Mamba3
. Last month, Etched announced it had successfully manufactured its chips via TSMC, completed testing of its first full systems with clients, and secured $1 billion worth of orders1
. The company earned investor confidence through private demonstrations, with figures like Andrej Karpathy from Anthropic, Noam Brown from OpenAI, and Geoffrey Hinton all testing the hardware firsthand1
.Scaling from Garage Servers to Mass Production
The journey from Harvard dropouts sleeping on floors to running a 400-person operation illustrates the rapid scaling challenge ahead. Wachen recalls arriving in the Bay Area with no office or apartment, sleeping on a friend's floor using a towel as a blanket, while the team ran chip-design servers in an early employee's garage
1
. Today, Etched operates a 2-megawatt data center and recently opened an 80,000-square-foot facility near its San Jose, California headquarters to expand mass production and prototyping5
. The company also established a factory in Taiwan and plans to start shipping its first racks this summer3
. Demand for Etched's AI inference systems continues to outpace supply as customers move from evaluation to deployment5
. Uberti states bluntly: "Now is the time to be aggressive. Our chips work, people want them, and it's time to ship"3
.
Source: ET
References
Summarized by
Navi
[3]
Related Stories
Recent Highlights
1
AI Leaders Warn UN Security Council of Existential Risks, Call for Global AI Governance
Policy and Regulation
2
AI Hallucination Nearly Sparked US Military Confrontation With Chinese Ship in Middle East
Technology
3
OpenAI AI Agent Breaches Australian Government Healthcare Portal in Historic Hack
Technology
Recent Highlights
Today's Top Stories
Don’t drown in AI news. We cut through the noise - filtering, ranking and summarizing the most important AI news, breakthroughs and research daily. Follow topics that matter to you and stay ahead.
