Etched fields funding offers at $40B+ valuation
3 hours ago
- Etched raised $700 million at a $21 billion valuation and is now receiving investment offers at double or more that valuation.
- Incoming bids range from $40 billion from top-tier investors to $50 billion from lesser-known backers, though talks are early and terms may change.
- The startup is building full AI hardware systems with its own proprietary chips, a particularly expensive segment of the AI industry.
- If Etched raises as much as its last round, it could have up to 3.5 years of runway.
- Venture capitalists are interested because Etched shows promise of challenging Nvidia.
- Jane Street led the last round and is a customer that took delivery of an early system; Etched has secured $1 billion in customer orders after manufacturing a test chip at TSMC.
- Etched designed two new components from scratch to speed up inference, claiming its chips process more tokens faster and at lower cost than Nvidia's.
- About 15% of its 400-person workforce previously worked at Nvidia.
- Etched operates a 10-megawatt data center in Silicon Valley and a facility in Taiwan near TSMC.
- The founders met at Harvard and dropped out to pursue the company, and Etched has a history of rapid funding rounds with big valuation leaps.