Etched soars to $10.3B — by burning the LLM rulebook
etched raised $300m at a $10.3b valuation to build chips that accelerate transformer inference, threatening nvidia's dominance with $1b in booked orders.
etched, founded by harvard dropouts, secured $300m in series c funding at a $10.3b valuation led by sequoia and backed by a16z and peter thiel. the startup claims its homegrown chips drastically accelerate llm inference by splitting the process into low-voltage prefill and shared-memory decode stages. the company says it has $1b in pre-orders and is shipping test systems to clients and investors like andrej karpathy. this challenges nvidia's general-purpose dominance by offering hardware specialized for transformers and mixture-of-experts models. success here hinges on mass production, proving specialized silicon can outperform gpus on cost and speed.