Sequoia Leads $300 Million Series C in AI Hardware Startup Etched at $10 Billion Valuation

Sequoia Leads $300 Million Series C in AI Hardware Startup Etched at $10 Billion Valuation Sequoia Capital has announced a partnership with AI chipmaker Etched, leading a $300 million Series C funding round at a $10 billion pre-money valuation alongside investors including Jane Street, Andreessen Horowitz, Diffusion, and SK Hynix. Etched was founded in 2022 by Harvard students Gavin, Chris, and Rob to build specialized hardware for AI inference. The startup has taped out a full-reticle A0 chip on TSMC's leading-edge nodes and plans to ship production-ready custom silicon in 2026. The system uses architectural approaches like low-voltage inference and cluster-scale memory to run diverse models including sparse MoEs, dense transformers, and Mamba. The team brought up its first multi-chip cluster within 40 days of tape-out to run inference across frontier AI models. Hardware Architecture and Performance Etched focuses on cluster-scale inference systems rather than isolated chips, incorporating technical research in low-voltage inference and cluster-scale memory to address throughput and latency. The platform is designed to handle changing frontier architectures, ranging from large sparse mixture-of-experts (MoEs) and dense transformers to alternatives like Mamba. Execution and Milestones Following an initial full-reticle A0 tape-out at TSMC, the company stood up a cluster of chips within 40 days to execute inference on frontier models. To accelerate development and deployment, Etched established a live lab in San Jose for rack testing and opened an office in Taiwan to work directly with manufacturing and supply partners. Series C Funding Sequoia is leading a $300 million Series C investment round in Etched at a $10 billion pre-money valuation. Participating investors include Jane Street, Andreessen Horowitz, Diffusion, and SK Hynix, supporting Etched's goal of delivering production-ready inference hardware in 2026.

红杉资本领投AI芯片初创公司Etched的3亿美元C轮融资，投前估值达100亿美元 红杉资本宣布领投AI推理芯片初创公司Etched的3亿美元C轮融资，投前估值达到100亿美元，Jane Street、a16z、Diffusion和SK海力士等跟投。Etched致力于构建集群级推理硬件系统，首代芯片计划于2026年出货。 红杉资本领投Etched的3亿美元C轮融资，投前估值为100亿美元，Jane Street、a16z、SK海力士等参投。 Etched由Gavin、Chris和Rob于2022年在哈佛宿舍创立，是后ChatGPT时代首个拥有量产就绪定制芯片并计划于2026年出货的硬件初创公司。 Etched在台积电先进制程完成了全掩膜板A0芯片流片，并在40天内完成了首个芯片集群的推理运行。 公司开创了低电压推理和集群规模内存等架构创新，支持MoE、稠密Transformer及Mamba等多种前沿模型架构。 技术创新与集群规模架构 Etched突破了单一芯片的设计思维，转向机架乃至集群规模的推理系统。公司在低电压推理与集群规模内存等领域取得架构突破，显著提升了吞吐量并降低了延迟。其推理系统全面兼容前沿AI模型，包括大型稀疏MoE、稠密Transformer以及Mamba等替代架构。 研发执行力与量产进展 Etched在台积电先进制程节点完成了全掩膜板A0芯片流片。在流片后的40天内，团队成功启动并运行了首个芯片集群进行前沿模型推理，在行业吞吐量与交互性曲线上取得了领先表现。为了保障供应链与测试效率，公司在圣何塞建立了实地实验室部署机架，并在台湾设立了办公室以便与供应商协同。 融资细节与未来展望 本轮3亿美元C轮融资由红杉资本领投，投前估值为100亿美元，投资方还包括Jane Street、Andreessen Horowitz、Diffusion和SK Hynix。红杉资本认为算力瓶颈制约着AI的发展，Etched不仅推出了具备市场竞争力的第一代产品，更建立了持续迭代下一代推理系统的工程与执行体系。

Inference is on the path to becoming the largest market in the world. If this AI dream is everything we hope it to be – and so far, the signs point to ever-increasing acceleration of capabilities – then inference will power every storefront, every movie, every medical encounter, every video game, every lawsuit, every line of code. Today, the inference market is so obviously large that building an inference-specific system is consensus. Back in 2022, when Gavin, Chris, and Rob were still in their dorm rooms at Harvard, that bet was deeply contrarian. The result: Etched is the only post-ChatGPT-era hardware startup with production-ready custom silicon, ready to ship in 2026. Over the past years, Etched has pioneered several research breakthroughs – low voltage inference and cluster-scale memory – each a hard-won architectural choice that drives step-change gains in throughput and latency. As the unit of compute has moved from the chip to the rack to the cluster, Etched has designed for that reality, building not just chips, but cluster-scale inference systems. Driven by these fundamental innovations, Etched’s inference system excels in throughput and interactivity on the full span of frontier models – from large sparse MoEs, to dense transformers, to alternative architectures entirely, like Mamba. Believing this is one thing. Building it is another entirely. Novel computing hardware is among the hardest things in the world to get right, and the ground underneath is constantly moving. Models change every few weeks, context lengths stretch, attention gets reinvented, the mix of dense and sparse keeps shifting. Winning here means doing two things simultaneously: iterating fast enough to keep pace with the models, and pushing the frontier of what the hardware can do. That takes a rare kind of team: visionary enough to create the right designs, young enough to move fast, proven enough to have chips in production, and built to do this for decades, not a single tape-out. Walking into the Etched office for the first time is like a bolt of lightning. Go in the morning or at 11 p.m. – the energy is the same, and it is infectious. Gavin and Rob are the kind of outliers both daring enough to design silicon from first principles and bold enough to knock down every obstacle in their path, and the team they have assembled matches them. We have watched them do the things that separate those who merely talk about hardware from those who ship it: standing up a live lab in San Jose to host their first racks; opening an office in Taiwan to colocate with suppliers and expedite testing; questioning every single assumption for what is possible, such as low voltage inference. “Production is the product” is the company’s mantra. Shipping is all that matters. The company’s progress has been rapid. Earlier this year, Etched taped out its first generation chip at TSMC, making it the first post-ChatGPT-era company with a successful full-reticle A0 chip tape-out on TSMC’s leading-edge nodes. Then, in a span of just 40 days, the Etched team brought up their first cluster of chips to run inference on a wide range of frontier AI models, achieving Pareto dominant performance on industry-standard throughput-interactivity curves. Now, Etched’s earliest customers are getting access to the product, seeing for themselves the speed, throughput, and expressiveness of the system. Etched has built a beautiful machine in Gen 1. We expect it will do very well in the market. But we are partnering with Etched because we believe they have built the rarest thing in this industry: the machine that builds the machine. This is a team that has the taste and the relentless execution to keep shipping the next generation of inference machines, faster and more ambitious each time. The intelligence race is fundamentally compute constrained. Pushing the limits of physics to deliver the maximum intelligence per watt is both an insanely fun engineering and operations problem, and an incredibly noble mission for humanity. We are delighted to be partnering with Etched and leading their $300 Million Series C at a $10 Billion pre-money valuation, joined by our friends at Jane Street, Andreessen Horowitz, Diffusion, and SK Hynix.