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Etched announced its $300M Series C at a $10.3B valuation, led by Sequoia. Onward, Etched.
The Etched thesis is simple. First, AI inference will be the largest market of the AI revolution. Second, meeting that demand requires new hardware: purpose built for inference, vertically integrated from silicon through systems, and designed to operate at gigawatt scale.
We’ve recently shared what makes the founders so remarkable and why we’ve invested in every round since then. The thesis, team, and opportunity have only compounded since.
The execution at Etched is remarkable. In under four years, Gavin Uberti, Robert Wachen and the team assembled hundreds of engineers, designed a new chip and system, secured the supply chain, had a successful A0 tapeout (something industry insiders repeatedly said would not happen), and began validating their first rack scale product with customers. Production is underway, with the first racks expected to ship this summer against more than $1B in customer contracts.
Etched is the first company with working silicon born after the ChatGPT moment. The team started with the requirements of frontier models and worked backward through the chip, memory, networking, power, cooling and software. Its Low Voltage Inference architecture allows more of the chip’s compute to remain active without thermal throttling. Its Cluster Scale Memory system combines the speed of SRAM with the capacity and economics of HBM. Together, these innovations are designed to deliver more throughput, lower latency and better economics at scale. The team explains the architecture in more detail here.
Alongside the financing, Etched announced a new 10 MW lab near its San Jose headquarters. The facility will allow the team to deploy its first generation product while developing the generations that follow. It is an important step toward serving gigawatt scale inference deployments.
We are thrilled to welcome Sequoia, one of Nvidia’s earliest institutional investors, to the partnership. This round gives Etched more resources to do what everything until now has prepared it to do: enter the market and deploy at scale.
It’s go time.
Congratulations to the entire Etched team.