Etched closes $300M Series C at $10.3B valuation, TechCrunch reports

Etched, an AI chip startup founded in 2022, has closed a $300 million Series C at a $10.3 billion valuation, co-founder and COO Robert Wachen told TechCrunch. Sequoia led the round, with Andreessen Horowitz, SK Hynix, Jane Street, and Diffusion Capital also participating, along with earlier investors. Other backers named by TechCrunch include Peter Thiel, Andrej Karpathy, Dylan Field, and Amjad Masad. The company was previously valued at $5 billion in December after a $500 million round, roughly doubling its valuation in about seven months. Etched said the Series C is the highest valuation ever for a Sequoia-led Series C. Last month, the company said it had manufactured its chips, that clients were testing first full systems, and that it had booked $1 billion in orders. Etched sells full systems rather than chips alone and says they can run a range of AI models, including mixture-of-experts systems such as DeepSeek and Qwen and non-transformer designs such as Mamba. Wachen said the firm designed separate components for the prefill and decode stages of inference, including what it calls low-voltage inference for prefill and cluster-scale memory interconnect for decode. Founders include CEO Gavin Uberti, Wachen, and CTO Chris Zhu; silicon has been manufactured by TSMC. TechCrunch reported the company has about 400 employees and operates a 2 megawatt data center.