Etched, a hardware startup founded by Harvard students in 2022, has raised $300 million in a Series C round at a $10 billion pre-money valuation. Primary Venture Partners led the investment, with participation from Jane Street, Andreessen Horowitz, Diffusion, and SK Hynix. The company builds inference-specific chips and cluster-scale systems for AI models. Etched earlier this year taped out its first generation chip at TSMC, becoming the first post-ChatGPT-era company with a successful full-reticle A0 chip tape-out on TSMC's leading-edge nodes. The company's technology focuses on improving throughput and latency through innovations including low voltage inference and cluster-scale memory. Etched plans to begin shipping its products in 2026, with early customers already testing the system.

Etched, an AI chip startup founded by three Harvard dropouts in 2022, has raised $300 million in Series C funding at a $10.3 billion valuation. The round was led by Sequoia, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, SK Hynix, Jane Street, and Diffusion Capital. The company has doubled its valuation from $5 billion in December. Last month, Etched announced it had successfully manufactured its chips and booked $1 billion in orders. Etched designs systems specifically for AI inference, creating two new components: a prefill chip using low-voltage technology and a cluster scale memory system. The company aims to deliver faster speeds at lower costs. Despite initial skepticism, Etched has attracted prominent investors including Peter Thiel, Andrej Karpathy, and Geoffrey Hinton through private demos. The startup now employs 400 people and operates a 2 megawatt data centre.

AI chip startup Etched has raised $800 million, with investors including Jane Street and a venture firm linked to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. The company, which aims to compete with Nvidia, plans to begin shipping chips to select customers this summer. The funding marks a significant milestone for Etched as it seeks to establish itself in the competitive AI chip market currently dominated by Nvidia.