AI chip startup Etched has raised $300 million in a Series C round, lifting its valuation to $10.3 billion, according to co-founder and COO Robert Wachen. The financing was led by Sequoia, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, SK Hynix, Jane Street and Diffusion Capital, alongside earlier supporters.
The company's value has climbed rapidly from $5 billion in December, when it completed a $500 million round. Etched says this is the highest valuation ever for a Sequoia-led Series C. The startup also reports that its first in-house chips have been manufactured, early systems are being tested by customers, and orders have already reached $1 billion.
Founded in 2022 by three former Harvard students, Etched set out to build hardware optimized for AI inference, the stage where a model turns a prompt into an answer. The company says its systems are designed to handle a wide range of AI architectures, including Mixture of Experts models and non-transformer designs.
Etched highlights two custom components at the center of its approach: a prefill chip built for faster processing at lower voltage, and a memory and interconnect design it calls cluster scale memory, aimed at enabling low-latency shared memory across multiple chips. The company says this combination can improve speed while reducing costs.
Access to the systems has so far been limited to investors and early customers, but the startup says private demonstrations helped attract prominent backers and industry attention. With a team of about 400 people and a 2-megawatt data center, Etched is now moving from concept to scale. Its trajectory suggests that specialized AI hardware may play a larger role in the next generation of computing.
