Etched has raised US$ 300 million in a Series C funding round, valuing the AI inference hardware company at US$ 10.3 billion, less than a month after emerging from stealth. The round was led by Sequoia, with participation from a16z, Jane Street, Diffusion and SK Hynix. The company said it will use the funding to increase production capacity and expand customer deployments.
Alongside a manufacturing facility established in Taiwan earlier this year, Etched has opened an 80,000-square-foot facility near its headquarters to support production and prototyping. The site will house a new product introduction (NPI) lab, an in-house surface-mount technology (SMT) line and additional deployment capacity as detailed in a press release.
Sonya Huang, Partner at Sequoia Capital said, “Inference is on the path to becoming the largest market in the world, and purpose-built compute will power the majority of the world’s inference. We have spent years studying the space and waiting for a company with the technical ambition, operational excellence, and execution required to define it. Etched is that company.”
Gavin Uberti, co-founder and CEO, Etched, said, “The infrastructure required to serve frontier AI sustainably and economically was never going to come from incremental improvements to existing hardware. This round reflects a growing industry conviction that the challenge demands a new entrant willing to rebuild the stack from first principles and deliver frontier inference without the trade-offs between speed, cost, and scale that have hampered this market until now.”
Etched is also developing two computing technologies aimed at improving power efficiency and memory performance in rack-scale AI systems.
Demand for its inference systems has exceeded supply as customers move from testing to production deployments. Etched now employs about 400 people, including engineers from NVIDIA, Broadcom, Google TPU, SK Hynix and high-frequency trading firms. Its San Jose headquarters includes a prototyping facility and a 2 MW datacentre running Etched hardware.