Etched raises $300M at $10.3B valuation
Inference-chip startup Etched doubled its valuation in about seven months, closing a Sequoia-led Series C weeks after booking its first $1B in chip orders.
Etched, the AI inference-chip startup founded by three Harvard dropouts in 2022, closed a $300 million Series C at a $10.3 billion valuation. Sequoia led the round; Andreessen Horowitz, SK Hynix, Jane Street, and Diffusion Capital joined alongside existing backers. The company was valued at $5 billion just seven months ago, in a December round that raised $500 million, meaning the valuation has roughly doubled since then. Sequoia is calling it the highest valuation the firm has ever led at the Series C stage.
Etched builds application-specific chips optimized purely for AI inference rather than general-purpose training-and-inference GPUs, betting that as more of the industry’s compute spend shifts toward running models rather than training them, a narrower, cheaper chip built for that one job can undercut NVIDIA on cost per token. The company said last month it had successfully manufactured its own silicon, that first full systems were already in testing with clients, and that it had booked $1 billion worth of orders.
Booked orders and a doubled valuation are a genuine signal that some buyers are willing to bet on a narrower alternative to NVIDIA for inference workloads specifically, alongside AMD’s newly expanded push into the same market with its Anthropic deal. But a funding round and manufactured silicon are not the same thing as proven performance at scale: Etched has not published independent client benchmarks, and inference-only chips carry real risk if model architectures shift in ways the hardware wasn’t designed for. Worth tracking as the client testing moves from private to public, not worth switching infrastructure plans over yet.