AI Chip Pioneer Etched Skyrockets to $21B Valuation in a Single Month
In an astonishing display of investor confidence, AI chip startup Etched has declared a $700 million Series D funding round. This announcement has rocketed its valuation to $21 billion, more than double its worth of $10.3 billion just a few weeks prior. The San Jose, California-based company, established in 2022 by Harvard dropouts Gavin Uberti and Chris Zhu, is swiftly rising as one of the most potent contenders to Nvidia’s supremacy in the AI chip market.
The funding round was spearheaded by quantitative trading titan Jane Street, Etched’s inaugural paying customer, which is already utilizing one of the startup’s server racks in its own datacenter. They were accompanied by industry heavyweights such as Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global, and Bain Capital Ventures. The company’s valuation has soared from $5 billion in December 2025 to $21 billion today, marking an increase of nearly $16 billion in less than a year.
Etched’s flagship chip, dubbed Sohu, is specifically designed for AI inference—the computing process that transpires each time an AI model generates a response. Instead of creating general-purpose accelerators, Etched is wagering that specialized, transformer-focused hardware will deliver faster and more cost-effective responses than flexible chips. The company has already secured over $1 billion in orders and has initiated shipping chips to customers. With hundreds of millions of people engaging with AI systems daily, the inference chip market is anticipated to experience substantial growth in the coming years.
Source: TechCrunch – Etched’s valuation doubles to $21B in a month