Etched, a company developing specialized inference clusters for artificial intelligence, has secured $300 million in new financing. This Series C funding, led by Sequoia, elevates the company's valuation to a remarkable $10.3 billion just one month after its public launch. The capital is earmarked for aggressively scaling production and accelerating customer deployments of its advanced hardware.
Addressing the AI Inference Bottleneck
Etched was founded on the principle that AI inference is the most critical workload of the modern technological era. The company contends that AI's full potential cannot be realized until inference becomes significantly faster and more affordable. Its mission is to bridge this gap by improving the economics and power efficiency of AI computation.
Pioneering Hardware and System Co-Design
At its core, Etched is developing two novel computing technologies targeting power and memory bottlenecks. The first, Low Voltage Inference (LVI), unlocks superior power and cost efficiency by enabling higher compute density within existing thermal limits. This approach allows the company's chips to achieve best-in-class throughput without being throttled by heat.
The second innovation is Cluster Scale Memory (CSM), a hybrid memory subsystem designed around the entire cluster. CSM creates a vast, shared pool of high-speed SRAM connected by a proprietary interconnect for faster memory access. This design avoids the typical cost, reliability, and thermal trade-offs associated with other advanced memory solutions.
Etched's hardware is designed to be architecture-agnostic, providing crucial flexibility for customers in a rapidly evolving AI landscape. The company's clusters support large models like DeepSeek and Qwen, as well as non-transformer designs such as Mamba. This ensures clients can serve future frontier models without being locked into a single architectural design.
Strategic Expansion to Meet Surging Demand
To meet customer demand that outpaces supply, Etched is rapidly expanding its operational footprint and team. The company recently opened a new 80,000-square-foot, 10-megawatt facility in Milpitas to expedite production and prototyping. This site will house a new product introduction lab and an in-house surface-mount technology line.
"Now is the time to be aggressive," stated Gavin Uberti, co-founder and CEO of Etched, highlighting the company's momentum. "Our chips work, people want them, and it’s time to ship." This round reflects a growing industry conviction that a new entrant is needed to deliver frontier inference.
Unprecedented Investor Confidence
The latest funding round, which included a16z, Jane Street, and SK Hynix, represents the highest valuation ever for a Sequoia-led Series C. This milestone underscores the significant confidence investors have in Etched's vision and execution capabilities. The company has now raised over $1 billion in total funding to support its ambitious goals.
Sonya Huang, a partner at Sequoia Capital, expressed strong conviction in the company's future, calling Etched the company to define the inference market. "What the team has accomplished in less than three years is extremely rare in the semiconductor world," she noted. Huang praised the company's technical ambition, operational excellence, and culture.
With $300 million in new capital and a $10.3 billion valuation, Etched is powerfully positioned to reshape the AI hardware landscape. The company is focused on scaling its unique inference clusters to "Gigawatt" capacity, aiming to make advanced AI globally accessible. As it moves to mass production, Etched is solidifying its role as a critical enabler of artificial intelligence.