AI chip startup Etched hits a 10.3 billion dollar valuation from big name investors

Etched, an AI chip startup founded by three Harvard dropouts, closed a 300 million dollar Series C funding round led by Sequoia at a 10.3 billion dollar valuation, according to TechCrunch, which the company says is the highest valuation ever for a Sequoia led Series C round. The round roughly doubles Etched's valuation in about seven months, after the company had previously raised at a 5 billion dollar valuation in December, alongside a growing list of prominent backers including Andreessen Horowitz, SK Hynix, Jane Street, Peter Thiel, and Anthropic researcher Andrej Karpathy. Etched builds inference chips and memory components the company says can speed up running any AI model without requiring Nvidia GPUs at all, an unusually direct positioning against the dominant supplier in AI hardware rather than the more common approach of competing on price or availability within the same general chip category. The company announced last month that it had successfully manufactured its own chips, that its first full systems were already being tested by customers, and that it had booked roughly 1 billion dollars worth of orders, giving the new valuation a foundation in actual manufactured hardware and customer commitments rather than only investor enthusiasm for the underlying technical approach. The rapid valuation growth reflects how much investor appetite has built for any credible alternative to Nvidia's dominance in AI compute, particularly one already shipping real hardware rather than remaining purely at the design or simulation stage.