Etched raises $300M at a $10.3B valuation for AI chip systems

In short: AI chip startup Etched says it raised $300 million and is now valued at $10.3 billion.

What happened

Etched, a startup founded in 2022 by three Harvard dropouts, closed a $300 million Series C funding round at a $10.3 billion valuation, according to co-founder and COO Robert Wachen.

TechCrunch reports the round was led by Sequoia and included Andreessen Horowitz, SK Hynix, Jane Street, and Diffusion Capital. The company also lists earlier backers such as Peter Thiel, Andrej Karpathy, Dylan Field, and Amjad Masad.

Etched was valued at $5 billion in December after a $500 million raise, so its valuation has roughly doubled in about seven months. Last month, the company said it had successfully manufactured its chips, that early customers were testing full systems, and that it had booked $1 billion in orders.

Etched builds hardware for running AI models. This is focused on “inference,” which is what happens after you type a question into an AI tool and it produces an answer (like a calculator doing the work after you press equals). Wachen said Etched uses a fast “prefill” chip to read and understand the prompt, plus a separate approach to memory for the “decode” step, which produces the words you see on screen.

Why it matters

AI services need a lot of computing power, and that can be expensive. If Etched’s systems can run many kinds of AI models without relying on today’s most common AI chips, it could affect how AI companies buy and run the computers behind popular AI apps.

Source: TechCrunch AI