AI chip startup Etched secures $300m Series C at $10.3bn valuation
Led by Sequoia Capital, the round brings Etched’s total backing to a level that reflects its claim of $1 billion in orders and a custom silicon architecture designed to bypass traditional graphics processing units.
Etched, an artificial intelligence chip startup founded by three Harvard dropouts, has closed a $300 million Series C funding round at a $10.3 billion valuation. The round was led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, SK Hynix, Jane Street, and Diffusion Capital. The company, which designs chips and memory components for AI inference, has doubled its valuation since its previous round in December. Etched claims its systems can run any AI model without requiring GPUs and has already booked $1 billion in orders.
The valuation marks the highest ever for a Sequoia-led Series C round, according to the company. Etched was previously valued at $5 billion in December 2025 when it raised a $500 million round, meaning it has doubled its valuation in about seven months. The new architecture features a prefill chip operating at lower voltage to reduce heat and increase transistor density, and a 'cluster scale memory' system for low-latency shared memory pools.
Etched’s technology is designed to accelerate AI inference, the computing process that occurs after a user submits a prompt. The company asserts its hardware supports diverse AI architectures, including Mixture of Experts models like DeepSeek and Qwen, as well as state-space models like Mamba, rather than relying solely on transformer-based large language models. This approach challenges the prevailing market dominance of Nvidia and the conventional reliance on GPUs for AI workloads.
The startup, founded in 2022 by CEO Gavin Uberti, COO Robert Wachen, and CTO Chris Zhu, has successfully manufactured its first silicon batch via TSMC and is currently testing full systems with clients and investors. The company now employs 400 people and operates a 2-megawatt data centre, a significant expansion from its early days of sleeping on floors and using garage servers.
While the concept of custom silicon for AI has historically faced scepticism, Etched argues its systems offer high speeds at lower costs by optimising the prefill and decode phases of inference. The company has secured backing from notable figures including Peter Thiel, Andrej Karpathy, and Geoffrey Hinton, who have reportedly tested the hardware in private demos. The firm continues to navigate the path from prototype to mass production as it seeks to establish a foothold in the competitive AI infrastructure market.
