Etched
Funding History
| Series B · 12/2025 | $5.0B |
|---|---|
| Series C · 07/2026 | $10.3B |
| August 2026 funding round (unconfirmed series designation) · 08/2026 | $21.0B |
About
Etched builds Sohu, an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) designed to run only transformer-architecture AI models -- the architecture behind essentially all of today's frontier large language models. By hard-wiring the chip to a single model architecture rather than building a general-purpose GPU, Etched claims Sohu can deliver substantially higher inference throughput per dollar and per watt than Nvidia GPUs for transformer workloads.
- CEO
- Gavin Uberti
- Employees
- 400+
- Headquarters
- San Jose, CA
- Founded
- 2022
- Website
- etched.com
Overview
Etched is a San Jose, California-based AI hardware startup building Sohu, an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) originally optimized for transformer models and since expanded to support additional architectures including mixture-of-experts and Mamba fabricated on TSMC's 4nm process, designed to run large-language-model inference faster and more cheaply than general-purpose GPUs. Founded in 2022 by three Harvard dropouts -- Gavin Uberti, Chris Zhu, and Robert Wachen -- the company spent several years in stealth before emerging publicly in mid-2026 with over $1 billion in booked customer contracts. Etched's pitch is that, because transformers now dominate essentially all frontier AI workloads, a chip purpose-built for the model architectures that dominate frontier AI workloads (rather than a general-purpose GPU) can be dramatically faster and more power-efficient for inference. Jane Street became its first paying customer, taking delivery of a production inference cluster in August 2026. Etched's valuation rose from roughly $5 billion in December 2025 to $10.3 billion in July 2026 and to $21 billion in August 2026, one of the fastest valuation climbs of the 2026 AI hardware cycle.
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