Etched emerges from stealth with working transformer-inference ASIC, $800M raised, $1B+ in customer contracts

AI chip startup Etched emerged from stealth on June 30 with a working transformer-inference ASIC, saying it has secured over $1 billion in signed customer contracts and raised $800 million in total financing. The company, which makes dedicated inference systems, said its latest round was $500 million in financing at a $5 billion post-money valuation in December 2025. Investors include VentureTech Alliance, Peter Thiel, Jane Street, Hudson River Trading, Jump Trading, Two Sigma, Stripes, Ribbit Capital, Radical Ventures, Primary VC, and Positive Sum, alongside AI figures Andrej Karpathy, Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, Stanley Druckenmiller, Arthur Mensch, and Scott Wu. Founded by Gavin Uberti (CEO) and Rob Wachen, Etched said it achieved first-pass silicon on TSMC's N4P process in under three years from seed funding. Its rack-scale inference systems currently run models including DeepSeek, Qwen, Mamba, and Llama. The company has assembled a team of more than 400 people, drawn largely from Nvidia, Broadcom, Google's TPU program, SK Hynix, and high-frequency trading firms. Etched has opened a Taiwan factory and a data center, test house, and prototyping lab at its San Jose headquarters, with a goal of reaching gigawatt-scale operations in 2027.