Etched hits $10.3B in Sequoia’s largest Series C ever, years after the VC rejected its three Harvard dropout founders — TFN

• Etched has raised $300 million at a $10.3 billion valuation, doubling its worth since December and setting a brand new file for a Sequoia-led Sequence C.
• In 2023, Etched’s three founders, all Harvard dropouts, had been turned down by most main buyers earlier than lastly gaining Sequoia’s assist on this spherical.
• New buyers SK Hynix and Jane Avenue joined this spherical, bringing Etched’s complete funding to greater than $1.1 billion in beneath 4 years.

Etched raised $300 million in its Sequence C spherical at a $10.3 billion valuation, doubling its worth in simply seven months. Sequoia Capital led the spherical, with Andreessen Horowitz, Jane Avenue, Diffusion, SK Hynix, and present buyers Peter Thiel and Leap Buying and selling additionally collaborating. Etched says that is the best valuation ever for a Sequoia-led Sequence C.

“Now could be the time to be aggressive. Our chips work, folks need them, and it’s time to ship,” says Gavin Uberti, co-founder and CEO of Etched.

The AI inference chip market is predicted to develop from $17.73 billion in 2025 to $20.51 billion in 2026, and reach $36.97 billion by 2030. The San Jose, California-based startup plans to take market share from Nvidia by providing specialised inference {hardware} as a substitute of general-purpose GPUs.

From rejection to a record-breaking spherical

Tech Funding Information has tracked Etched’s journey from its $120 million Series A in 2024, via a $500 million round at a $5 billion valuation in December 2025, to a January 2026 function on its rise from a struggling startup to a $5 billion Nvidia competitor.

Uberti, Chris Zhu, and Rob Wachen, three Harvard dropouts and Thiel Fellows, based Etched in 2022 to develop chips for AI inference. Sequoia turned down the founders’ detailed proposal for devoted inference silicon for years, and most main buyers additionally handed.

The Silicon Valley firm ran on restricted assets till Main Enterprise Companions and Constructive Sum Ventures backed its Sequence A. Sequoia lastly invested on this spherical after Etched’s {hardware} moved from idea to real-world use with clients.

“We have a tendency to not rejoice fundraises. We’ve plenty of work to do to get to Gigawatt scale. We’re excited to companion with the perfect AI infrastructure buyers on the planet to get there quicker. The staff is working across the clock with our early clients to deliver our first product to life. We’re tremendous excited,” says Wachen, co-founder and president of Etched.

What Etched builds and who it competes with

Etched builds rack-scale inference clusters as a substitute of utilizing general-purpose GPUs. Its methods assist giant mixture-of-experts fashions like DeepSeek and Qwen, in addition to non-transformer architectures like Mamba, so clients are usually not restricted to 1 mannequin design.

The primary applied sciences are Low Voltage Inference, which boosts computing energy with out utilizing extra power, and Cluster Scale Reminiscence, which shares SRAM and HBM throughout a cluster. This enables clients to run completely different mannequin varieties on one system, so they don’t want separate GPU clusters.

The aggressive panorama has modified rapidly in 2026. Cerebras went public in May 2026 at nearly a $56 billion valuation, making it the biggest US tech IPO since Snowflake in 2020. Nvidia bought Groq for about $20 billion in December 2025, and Microsoft-backed d-Matrix raised $275 million at a $2 billion valuation across the similar time.

Whereas Cerebras makes wafer-scale chips and Groq’s expertise is now a part of Nvidia, Etched stands out by staying impartial and supporting greater than ten completely different mannequin households.

“We’ve spent years finding out the area and ready for a corporation with the technical ambition, operational excellence, and execution required to outline it. Etched is that firm,” says Sonya Huang, a companion at Sequoia Capital.

The invoice and what’s subsequent

The brand new funding pays for an 80,000-square-foot prototyping facility in Milpitas and an in-house surface-mount expertise line, which can work alongside Etched’s manufacturing unit in Taiwan. The corporate now has about 400 workers, up from simply 35 in 2024.

With this spherical, complete funding is now over $1.1 billion, following a $500 million spherical in December 2025 that valued Etched at $5 billion. Sequoia has invested in firms like Airbnb and Stripe earlier than, however that is its first main funding in inference {hardware} at this scale.

Etched went from being seen as unfundable to touchdown Sequoia’s largest Sequence C deal in lower than three years, all with out main adjustments to its technique. The large query now’s whether or not this method will nonetheless work if the following large breakthrough within the trade may be very completely different from as we speak’s transformer architectures.