Etched

Etched is an American AI-chip startup founded in 2022 by Harvard dropouts and Thiel Fellows Gavin Uberti, Robert Wachen, and Chris Zhu, headquartered in Cupertino, California. The company designs Sohu, a chip it calls the first purpose-built for the transformer architecture that underpins modern large language models. Rather than the general-purpose flexibility of a GPU, Sohu hard-wires the matrix-multiplication patterns specific to transformer inference — fabricated on TSMC's 4-nanometer process — a bet that trading flexibility for specialization yields far better speed and cost on the one workload that now dominates AI compute. Etched sells both the chips and full frontier inference clusters that pair them with custom racks and software. Its newer designs split inference across purpose-built silicon for each phase — a low-voltage prefill chip for the prompt and a cluster-scale memory interconnect for token generation. It has booked more than $1 billion in orders and, in a July 2026 Series C led by Sequoia, added Andreessen Horowitz and SK Hynix to a backer roster that already included Jane Street, Hudson River Trading, Two Sigma, and Ribbit Capital, with angel investment from Andrej Karpathy, Geoffrey Hinton, and Peter Thiel. In August 2026 it raised a further $700 million led by Jane Street, roughly doubling its valuation a month after the Series C. The more meaningful detail is that Jane Street is running the product as well as funding it: the quantitative-trading firm has installed Etched's first shipped cluster in its own data center, making the lead investor also the first production customer. One named deployment is a real milestone for a specialized chip, though not yet evidence of broad demand. It competes with Nvidia's inference GPUs as well as Cerebras and Groq.