AI chip startup Etched completes $300 million Series C financing, with a post-money valuation of $10.3 billion

PANews July 24, TechCrunch reported that AI chip startup Etched completed a $300 million Series C funding round, led by Sequoia. Andreessen Horowitz, SK hynix, Jane Street, and Diffusion Capital also participated. Post-money valuation reached $10.3 billion, doubling from a $5 billion valuation in December last year. Etched was founded in 2022 by three Harvard dropout students and designs chips specifically for AI models based on the Transformer architecture. The company said it has successfully manufactured its own chips and has them tested by customers, and has received $1 billion in orders.

Etched has developed two new components for the inference process: a prefill chip that runs at low voltage to significantly improve speed and reduce heat, and a decoding chip that uses cluster-level memory technology to enable sharing a memory pool across chips. Etched currently has 400 employees, operates a 2MW data center, and has newly opened an 80k-square-foot, 10MW facility in Milpitas.