AI chip startup Etched defies skeptics, hits $10.3B valuation from big-name investors
8:00 AM PDT · July 23, 2026
Etched, the AI chip startup founded by three Harvard dropouts in 2022, has closed a 10.3 billion valuation, co-founder and COO Robert Wachen tells TechCrunch.
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 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 sells full systems, not just chips. Wachen says systems can run any AI model, including Mixture of Experts models like DeepSeek and Qwen, as well as non-transformer designs like Mamba (state-space models)—countering the perception that chips run only specific LLMs.
Etched designed two components from scratch for inference: a prefill chip using “low-voltage inference” (lower heat, more transistors) and a decode-side “cluster-scale memory” interconnect for shared memory pools at low latency. Goal: high speeds at lower costs.
Access has been limited to investors and early customers via private demos. Wachen says Andrej Karpathy, Noam Brown, Geoffrey Hinton, and round investors tried the hardware. Company has ~400 employees, a 2MW on-site data center, and a new 80,000 sq ft / 10MW facility in Milpitas. Founders: CEO Gavin Uberti, COO Robert Wachen, Chris Zhu. Note: story updated to include the new 10MW facility.