AI chip startup Etched exits stealth with working silicon and $800 million raised

Etched, an AI inference chip startup, emerged from stealth on June 30, 2026 with working silicon, $800 million raised across four rounds and more than $1 billion in signed customer contracts, the company said. The startup, co-founded by Harvard Thiel Fellows Gavin Uberti, Robert Wachen and Chris Zhu, is betting a fixed-function chip can undercut general-purpose GPUs on the narrow job of running large models.

The pull is the order book. A pre-revenue chip startup claiming over $1 billion in signed contracts is the rarer signal here, more telling than the funding total in a year of large semiconductor raises. Etched said it hit first-pass silicon success on TSMC’s N4P process with the chip previously known as “Sohu,” first announced in June 2024, and that the system runs DeepSeek, Qwen, Mamba and Llama models.

The money arrived in stages. Etched’s $500 million round in December valued it at $5 billion post-money, and its investor list spans trading firms Jane Street, Hudson River Trading, Jump Trading and Two Sigma, plus a TSMC-linked fund and individuals including Andrej Karpathy, Geoffrey Hinton and Fei-Fei Li, according to the company.

Etched describes two core technologies: Low Voltage Inference, which it says runs at under half the voltage of most AI chips, and Cluster Scale Memory, a hybrid design mixing high-bandwidth memory and SRAM. The company employs more than 400 engineers from Nvidia, Google, Broadcom, SK Hynix and TSMC, and runs a Taiwan factory and a San Jose headquarters, targeting gigawatt-scale capacity by 2027.

The contract value, voltage and performance claims all come from Etched and have not been independently verified. Signed contracts are not shipped chips, and first-pass silicon is a milestone, not volume production.