Etched hits $10.3B valuation in $300M raise, doubling in seven months
What's the deal? Etched, the AI chip startup founded by three Harvard dropouts in 2022, has closed a $300 million Series C at a $10.3 billion valuation. Sequoia led the round, with Andreessen Horowitz, SK HynixDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Jane StreetDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and Diffusion CapitalDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → participating.
Who else is in? Backers include Peter ThielDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, former Tesla AI head Andrej KarpathyDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Figma's Dylan FieldDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and Replit's Amjad MasadDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →. The company says this is the highest valuation ever for a Sequoia-led Series C.
Why now? Etched was valued at $5 billion in December, so it has doubled its valuation in about seven months. In June 2026 it said it had manufactured its homegrown chips, put first full systems into client testing, and booked $1 billion in orders.
What's the endgame? Etched builds full systems — not just chips — designed to speed up inference, the computing that happens after a user submits a prompt. It designed two new components to split that work across "prefill" and "decode" phases.
How it works: The prefill chip runs at lower voltage, generating less heat so it can pack in more transistors. For decode, Etched built shared-memory "interconnect technology" letting many chips draw from one low-latency memory pool. The claim: high speed at lower cost.
Fighting the doubters: The company still battles the perception that its systems run only specific models. Co-founder and chief operating officer Robert Wachen says that's not the case — they run any model, including Mixture of Experts designs like DeepSeek and non-transformer designs like Mamba. Skeptics persisted even after TSMC manufactured its first silicon, partly because access has been limited to investors and early customers.
The signal: The round ranks in the top 1% of all Series C deals ever raised by US semiconductor companies, out of 334 comparable rounds. That places Etched among the most richly backed chip startups betting they can carve share from Nvidia's grip on AI compute.
Read more: TechCrunch
