AI chip start-up Etched has raised $300 million in a Series C funding round that values the company at $10.3 billion. The new valuation is more than double the $5 billion figure attached to its $500 million financing in December.
Sequoia Capital led the round, with Andreessen Horowitz, SK Hynix, Jane Street, Diffusion Capital and Argo also participating. Etched said it has started manufacturing hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of inference systems following the successful production of its first custom chips.
Etched Develops Hardware for AI Inference
Etched designs complete systems for inference, the process used when trained AI models respond to prompts. Its hardware separates inference into prefill, which processes a prompt and its context, and decode, which generates the answer token by token.
The company developed a low-voltage chip for prefill workloads. It says the lower operating voltage reduces heat and allows more transistors to be placed within the processor.
For decode workloads, Etched created cluster-scale memory technology that lets multiple chips access a shared memory pool with low latency. The company says this design can increase processing speed while reducing power and operating costs.
Etched said in its official funding announcement that its systems can support transformer models, Mixture of Experts systems such as DeepSeek and Qwen, and state-space architectures such as Mamba.
Customer Orders Reach $1 Billion
Etched received its first A0 silicon from TSMC earlier this year and is testing complete rack-scale systems with customers. The company says it has secured more than $1 billion in orders, although it has not identified the buyers or disclosed delivery schedules.
Co-founder Robert Wachen said early access has been limited to investors and selected customers. Etched says researchers and industry figures, including Geoffrey Hinton, Andrej Karpathy and OpenAI researcher Noam Brown, have tested its hardware privately.
Sequoia said Etched’s production-ready custom silicon is scheduled to begin shipping in 2026. The investor described low-voltage inference and cluster-scale memory as the company’s main technical developments.
New Facility Supports Production Testing
Etched now employs more than 400 people and operates a two-megawatt data centre at its San Jose office. It has also opened an 80,000-square-foot facility in Milpitas with 10 megawatts of capacity, a hardware laboratory and an in-house assembly line.
The company was founded in 2022 by Harvard dropouts Gavin Uberti, Robert Wachen and Chris Zhu. The new funding will support manufacturing, testing and deployment as Etched prepares its inference systems for wider customer use.
Featured image credits: Public Domain Pictures
For more stories like it, click the +Follow button at the top of this page to follow us.