📰 Sequoia Leads $300M Round in AI Chip Startup Etched at $10B Valuation
Sequoia Capital announced it is leading a $300 million Series C in Etched, an AI inference-hardware startup, at a $10 billion pre-money valuation, joined by Jane Street, Andreessen Horowitz, Diffusion and SK Hynix. Founded by three Harvard dropouts in 2022, Etched builds custom silicon dedicated entirely to inference and, after taping out its first chip at TSMC, brought up a production cluster in just 40 days, hitting Pareto-dominant throughput-interactivity performance across frontier models including MoEs, dense transformers and Mamba architectures. Sequoia frames inference as poised to become the largest compute market in the world, signaling strong investor conviction that specialized AI hardware — not just model software — will be a major axis of venture returns through 2026.
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