Etched, an AI chip startup founded by three Harvard dropouts in 2022, has closed a $300 million Series C funding round at a $10.3 billion valuation, doubling its worth in roughly seven months. The round, led by Sequoia with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, SK Hynix, Jane Street and Diffusion Capital, comes as the company shakes off scepticism that greeted its early bet on building chips tailored specifically for transformer-based AI models, an approach many initially dismissed as unworkable.

The company says the valuation marks the highest ever for a Sequoia-led Series C, up from $5 billion when it raised $500 million last December. Last month Etched confirmed it had successfully manufactured its chips via TSMC, with first full systems now being tested by clients and roughly $1 billion in orders already booked. Co-founder Robert Wachen said the systems, unlike earlier assumptions, can run any AI model, including Mixture of Experts designs such as DeepSeek and Qwen and non-transformer architectures like Mamba, thanks to newly designed prefill and decode components that boost inference speed while cutting costs. Access to the systems has so far been limited to investors and early customers, including high-profile figures such as Andrej Karpathy and Geoffrey Hinton, who saw private demonstrations before backing the company.