Key facts
- AI chip startup Etched closed a $300 million Series C funding round.
- The company's valuation reached $10.3 billion, doubling in seven months.
- The funding round was led by Sequoia, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, SK Hynix, Jane Street, and Diffusion Capital.
- Etched's systems are designed to accelerate AI inference, specifically the prefill and decode stages.
- The company has successfully manufactured its chips and booked $1 billion in orders.
AI chip startup Etched has successfully closed a $300 million Series C funding round, achieving a valuation of $10.3 billion. This marks a significant increase from its previous $5 billion valuation in December, effectively doubling its worth in approximately seven months. The funding round was led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from prominent investors including Andreessen Horowitz, SK Hynix, Jane Street, and Diffusion Capital, alongside earlier backers like Peter Thiel and Andrej Karpathy.
Etched, founded in 2022 by three Harvard dropouts, focuses on designing chips and full systems optimized for AI inference, the process of generating outputs from AI models. The company claims its proprietary technology, including a specialized prefill chip and a cluster scale memory system, significantly speeds up inference while reducing costs through a method they call "low-voltage inference." This approach allows for more transistors and less heat generation.
Despite initial skepticism surrounding the concept of custom AI chips, Etched has announced the successful manufacturing of its homegrown silicon by TSMC and has already secured $1 billion in orders. The company's systems are designed to be versatile, capable of running various AI models, including those based on transformer architecture like ChatGPT and Claude, as well as Mixture of Experts models and non-transformer designs such as Mamba.
Co-founder and COO Robert Wachen highlighted that access to the hardware has been limited to investors and early customers, who have provided positive feedback after private demonstrations. The startup has grown to 400 employees and operates a 2-megawatt data center, indicating substantial progress from its early days of operating out of a garage.