Etched secures $300M at $10.3B valuation, defying AI chip skeptics

Etched, an 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 told TechCrunch. The round was led by Sequoia, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, SK Hynix, Jane Street, and Diffusion Capital, among others. The company previously raised $500 million in December at a $5 billion valuation, doubling its valuation in about seven months. Etched claims this is the highest valuation ever for a Sequoia-led Series C. The startup designed two new components from scratch to speed up AI inference: a prefill chip that operates at lower voltage for faster performance, and a cluster-scale memory interconnect technology for the decode phase. Etched's chips are designed to run any AI model, including mixture-of-experts and non-transformer architectures. The company has already booked $1 billion in orders and its systems are being tested by clients. Despite initial skepticism, Etched secured investors by demonstrating hardware in private demos. The founders, who dropped out of Harvard, have grown the team to 400 people and now operate a 2 megawatt data center in San Jose and a new 80,000 square-foot, 10MW facility in Milpitas.