AI chipmaker Etched has closed a $300 million Series C round at a $10.3 billion valuation, twice its December level, TechCrunch reported.
Sequoia led the round, with Andreessen Horowitz, SK Hynix, Jane Street and Diffusion Capital also participating. The startup raised $500 million at a $5 billion valuation in December.
The company says its first batch of chips has been manufactured by TSMC, complete systems are being tested by customers and booked orders have reached $1 billion.
Etched sells complete inference systems rather than standalone processors. Inference is the stage when an AI model generates a response for a user. The company says its hardware can run transformer models, including Mixture of Experts architectures, as well as other designs such as Mamba.
The company divides inference into the initial processing of a prompt and the generation of an answer. A low-voltage chip accelerates the first stage, while Etched developed shared memory linking multiple processors for the second.
“We call this technology cluster-scale memory. It allows many chips to connect together and use a shared memory pool at a very, very fast, low latency,” — Robert Wachen, Etched co-founder and COO
Access to the systems remains limited to investors and early customers. Etched employs about 400 people and has opened an 80,000-square-foot, 10MW facility in Milpitas, but mass production and delivery of its rack systems have not yet begun.
