AI chip startup Etched secures $10.3B valuation in new funding round

AI chip startup Etched announced on July 23, 2026, that it has closed a $300 million Series C funding round, reaching a valuation of $10.3 billion. The round was led by Sequoia Capital and included participation from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, memory manufacturer SK Hynix, and trading firm Jane Street.

The company states this is the highest valuation ever for a Series C round led by Sequoia. Etched, founded in 2022 by three Harvard University dropouts, has developed new chips and memory components designed to accelerate inference for artificial intelligence models without requiring dedicated graphics processing units (GPUs).

Etched's valuation has doubled in approximately seven months since its previous $500 million round. The company recently confirmed successful manufacturing of its custom chips and initiated testing of its first full systems with clients, reporting $1 billion in booked orders.

Despite initial skepticism surrounding specialized AI chips, Etched's systems are capable of running a wide range of AI models. This includes those based on the Transformer architecture, such as ChatGPT, as well as Mixture of Experts models and non-Transformer designs like Mamba, which utilize different underlying architectures.