Etched AI chip startup doubles valuation to $10.3B in Series C

Etched's journey reflects a broader shift in how the tech industry approaches AI infrastructure. When the three Harvard dropouts founded the company in 2022, the notion of designing chips specifically for transformer-based AI models was considered risky — most of the tech world, besides Nvidia, had not yet grasped the specialized compute demands of modern AI. The startup faced sustained skepticism, yet the founders persisted through manufacturing challenges and a slow path to market validation.

The company's recent milestones suggest that skepticism has given way to confidence among sophisticated investors and AI builders. Etched's claim that its systems can run any AI architecture — not just transformers, but also Mixture of Experts models like DeepSeek and Qwen, as well as state-space models like Mamba — directly addresses an early criticism that its chips were too specialized. The $1 billion（約1600億円） in booked orders and partnership with major AI companies indicate genuine demand. That Andrej Karpathy, Noam Brown from OpenAI, and Geoffrey Hinton tried the hardware in person and became investors underscores the role of hands-on demonstration in winning over the AI research community.