Etched Doubles to a $10.3 Billion Valuation Three Weeks After Showing Its Silicon

Etched raised $300 million in a Series C led by Sequoia Capital at a $10.3 billion post-money valuation, the company said on Thursday — twenty-three days after it came out of stealth for the second time and unveiled the silicon it had spent four years building. The company says it is the highest valuation ever recorded for a Sequoia-led Series C.

The round

Andreessen Horowitz, Jane Street, Diffusion and SK hynix joined alongside existing backers. The valuation is roughly double the $5 billion Etched commanded in a $500 million round led by Stripes that closed in December 2025 — a repricing that took about seven months. Total funding is now above $1 billion. Sequoia partner Sonya Huang led the deal.

What it actually sells

Not a chip — a rack. Etched builds what it calls frontier inference clusters: custom accelerators, memory, cooling, interconnect and software sold as one system, aimed only at inference. Two claims carry the architecture. Low Voltage Inference runs the math blocks at under half normal voltage, cutting heat and buying clock speed. Cluster Scale Memory is a hybrid SRAM/HBM pool that lets every accelerator in a rack address the same memory, with a separate low-voltage prefill chip and a proprietary interconnect handling decode.

The skeptics

In 2023 the founders — Harvard dropouts Gavin Uberti, Robert Wachen and Chris Zhu — pitched a 30-page memo and were passed on by every major investor, running the company month to month. The standing objection was that fixed-function inference silicon would only ever run a handful of models. Wachen disputes that, citing support for mixture-of-experts architectures including DeepSeek and Qwen, and for non-transformer Mamba state-space models. Google's own Frozen v2 chip pursues comparable ideas.

And there may be more

The Wall Street Journal reported on July 17 that Etched was in separate talks at a $20 billion valuation. This round confirms the first half of that report; the second is still unconfirmed. Etched has about 400 employees, an 80,000-square-foot, 10-megawatt facility in Milpitas, and says customers are moving from evaluation to deployment faster than it can build racks. Customer names remain undisclosed.