Etched raises $300M at $10.3B valuation for transformer-only AI inference chips

On July 23, 2026 AI-chip startup Etched — founded by three Harvard dropouts in 2022 — closed a $300M Series C led by Sequoia at a $10.3B valuation, with a16z, Jane Street and SK Hynix participating, pushing total funding past $1B. Its Sohu chip is a transformer-specific ASIC on TSMC 4nm that claims roughly 20x inference speedup over Nvidia's H100, with about $1B in prospective customer demand. The valuation doubled from $5B in about seven months.