AI chip startup Etched defies skeptics, hits $10.3B valuation from big-name investors
Etched, founded by three Harvard dropouts, has created new chips and memory components that speed up inference on any AI model -- no GPUs required, it says. Etched, the AI chip startup founded by three Harvard dropouts in 2022, has closed a $300 million Series C funding round at a $10. 3 billion valuation, co-founder and COO Robert Wachen tells TechCrunch.
Key Takeaways
- The round was led by Sequoia, with Andreessen Horowitz, SK Hynix, Jane Street, and Diffusion Capital also participating, along with other, earlier investors.
Other backers of the company include names like Peter Thiel, Andrej Karpathy, Dylan Field, Amjad Masad, and more.
- The company is still battling the perception that its products - which are sold as full systems, not just chips - involve chips designed to run only specific LLMs.
- " The "prefill phase" involves understanding the prompt, including context.
- For the decode process, Etched created a new type of memory and "interconnect technology that we call cluster-scale memory.
It allows many chips to connect together and use a shared memory pool at a very, very fast, low latency," he says.
- "Andrej Karpathy from Anthropic, Noam Brown from OpenAI, Geoffrey Hinton, as well as all the investors in the funding round - these are all people who actually tried the hardware and are very excited about it," Wachen says.
Stats & Key Facts
- #Etched, the AI chip startup founded by three Harvard dropouts in 2022, has closed a $300 million Series C funding round at a $10.
- #3 billion valuation, co-founder and COO Robert Wachen tells TechCrunch.
- #Etched was previously valued at $5 billion in December when it raised a $500 million round, meaning it has doubled its valuation in about seven months.
- #Last month, Etched announced that it had successfully manufactured its homegrown chips , that its first full systems were being tested by clients, and it had already booked $1 billion worth of orders.
The round was led by Sequoia, with Andreessen Horowitz, SK Hynix, Jane Street, and Diffusion Capital also participating, along with other, earlier investors. Other backers of the company include names like Peter Thiel, Andrej Karpathy, Dylan Field, Amjad Masad, and more. Etched was previously valued at $5 billion in December when it raised a $500 million round, meaning it has doubled its valuation in about seven months.
The company says this is the highest valuation ever for a Sequoia-led Series C. Last month, Etched announced that it had successfully manufactured its homegrown chips , that its first full systems were being tested by clients, and it had already booked $1 billion worth of orders. Etched launched at a time when the idea of building a chip specifically for AI models based on transformer technology (the architecture behind most modern AI systems, including ChatGPT and Claude) was considered wild if not wacky.
The company is still battling the perception that its products - which are sold as full systems, not just chips - involve chips designed to run only specific LLMs. That's not the case, Wachen explains. The systems can run any AI model, including Mixture of Experts models like DeepSeek and Qwen - an architecture that splits tasks across specialized sub-models rather than relying on one large model - as well as non-transformer designs like Mamba, which is built on a different underlying architecture known as a state-space model.
For more details please read the original article at TechCrunch AI.
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