Nvidia AI chip competitor Etched says it has already booked $1 billion in contract orders for its products. Etched is currently in the process of testing that first product with customers.
Etched, founded in 2022, also disclosed that it has now raised a total of $800 million in funding to date. The most recent tranche was an unannounced $500 million round closed in December at a $5 billion post-money valuation, the company said.
Etched has attracted a notable group of investors, too, including VentureTech Alliance, Jane Street, Hudson River Trading, Two Sigma, Ribbit Capital, and Stripes, who led the $500 million round.
The startup has also secured angel investment from AI heavyweights including Andrej Karpathy, Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, Arthur Mensch, and Scott Wu. The cap table also includes billionaires Stanley Druckenmiller and Peter Thiel.
In under three years from seed funding, Etched has achieved first-pass (A0) silicon success on TSMC’s N4P process, and is now validating its first rack-scale product with customers.
Today’s funding environment looks like a different planet by comparison. Investors are chasing everything AI-related, especially chip technology that speeds up inference. Competitor Cerebras had the first breakout IPO of the year, while AI chip maker Groq just raised $650 million. Hyperscalers Amazon, Google, and Microsoft all build their own in-house AI chips. Even OpenAI just announced its first custom chip, built by Broadcom.