Etched, an AI inference chip startup founded by three Harvard dropouts, closed a $300 million Series C round led by Sequoia Capital at a $10.3 billion valuation. The raise doubles the company's valuation from the $5 billion mark it hit just seven months ago, in December, and Sequoia is calling it the highest valuation ever for one of its Series C deals.
The round drew backing from Andreessen Horowitz, SK Hynix, Jane Street and Diffusion Capital, alongside individual investors including Peter Thiel, Andrej Karpathy, Dylan Field and Amjad Masad. Etched builds custom silicon aimed squarely at Nvidia's dominance in AI inference — the process of running trained models rather than training them — with a prefill chip for the compute-heavy first stage and a decode chip built around a new cluster-scale memory interconnect that lets multiple chips share memory pools with low latency.
TSMC has already manufactured Etched's first chip, and complete systems are now in customer testing. The company says it has secured $1 billion in orders and will use the fresh funding to scale production and deployments — a sign that investors still see room for challengers even as Nvidia keeps expanding its own inference lineup.