- Etched has raised $300 million at a $10.3 billion valuation, doubling its worth since December and setting a brand new document for a Sequoia-led Collection C.
- In 2023, Etched’s three founders, all Harvard dropouts, had been turned down by most main buyers earlier than lastly gaining Sequoia’s help on this spherical.
- New buyers SK Hynix and Jane Road joined this spherical, bringing Etched’s complete funding to greater than $1.1 billion in underneath 4 years.
Etched raised $300 million in its Collection C spherical at a $10.3 billion valuation, doubling its worth in simply seven months. Sequoia Capital led the spherical, with Andreessen Horowitz, Jane Road, Diffusion, SK Hynix, and present buyers Peter Thiel and Soar Buying and selling additionally taking part. Etched says that is the best valuation ever for a Sequoia-led Collection C.
“Now could be the time to be aggressive. Our chips work, folks need them, and it’s time to ship,” says Gavin Uberti, co-founder and CEO of Etched.
The AI inference chip market is predicted to develop from $17.73 billion in 2025 to $20.51 billion in 2026, and reach $36.97 billion by 2030. The San Jose, California-based startup plans to take market share from Nvidia by providing specialised inference {hardware} as an alternative of general-purpose GPUs.
From rejection to a record-breaking spherical
Tech Funding Information has tracked Etched’s journey from its $120 million Series A in 2024, by means of a $500 million round at a $5 billion valuation in December 2025, to a January 2026 function on its rise from a struggling startup to a $5 billion Nvidia competitor.
Uberti, Chris Zhu, and Rob Wachen, three Harvard dropouts and Thiel Fellows, based Etched in 2022 to develop chips for AI inference. Sequoia turned down the founders’ detailed proposal for devoted inference silicon for years, and most main buyers additionally handed.
The Silicon Valley firm ran on restricted assets till Major Enterprise Companions and Constructive Sum Ventures backed its Collection A. Sequoia lastly invested on this spherical after Etched’s {hardware} moved from idea to real-world use with clients.
“We have a tendency to not have fun fundraises. We’ve lots of work to do to get to Gigawatt scale. We’re excited to companion with the most effective AI infrastructure buyers on this planet to get there quicker. The crew is working across the clock with our early clients to deliver our first product to life. We’re tremendous excited,” says Wachen, co-founder and president of Etched.
What Etched builds and who it competes with
Etched builds rack-scale inference clusters as an alternative of utilizing general-purpose GPUs. Its techniques help massive mixture-of-experts fashions like DeepSeek and Qwen, in addition to non-transformer architectures like Mamba, so clients are usually not restricted to 1 mannequin design.
The primary applied sciences are Low Voltage Inference, which boosts computing energy with out utilizing extra power, and Cluster Scale Reminiscence, which shares SRAM and HBM throughout a cluster. This enables clients to run completely different mannequin sorts on one system, so they don’t want separate GPU clusters.
The aggressive panorama has modified shortly in 2026. Cerebras went public in May 2026 at nearly a $56 billion valuation, making it the most important US tech IPO since Snowflake in 2020. Nvidia bought Groq for about $20 billion in December 2025, and Microsoft-backed d-Matrix raised $275 million at a $2 billion valuation across the identical time.
Whereas Cerebras makes wafer-scale chips and Groq’s expertise is now a part of Nvidia, Etched stands out by staying unbiased and supporting greater than ten completely different mannequin households.
“We’ve spent years learning the house and ready for a corporation with the technical ambition, operational excellence, and execution required to outline it. Etched is that firm,” says Sonya Huang, a companion at Sequoia Capital.
The invoice and what’s subsequent
The brand new funding pays for an 80,000-square-foot prototyping facility in Milpitas and an in-house surface-mount expertise line, which can work alongside Etched’s manufacturing facility in Taiwan. The corporate now has about 400 workers, up from simply 35 in 2024.
With this spherical, complete funding is now over $1.1 billion, following a $500 million spherical in December 2025 that valued Etched at $5 billion. Sequoia has invested in firms like Airbnb and Stripe earlier than, however that is its first main funding in inference {hardware} at this scale.
Etched went from being seen as unfundable to touchdown Sequoia’s largest Collection C deal in lower than three years, all with out main adjustments to its technique. The massive query now’s whether or not this method will nonetheless work if the following huge breakthrough within the trade may be very completely different from at this time’s transformer architectures.
