On July 23, 2026, Etched announced a $300 million Series C at a $10.3 billion valuation, led by Sequoia Capital with participation from a16z, Jane Street, Diffusion, and SK Hynix. The company said the round is the highest valuation ever for a Sequoia-led Series C.
Etched builds hardware specialised for AI inference rather than general-purpose training. The announcement centres on two technologies: Low Voltage Inference, aimed at power efficiency, and Cluster Scale Memory, a hybrid SRAM and HBM memory subsystem. The proceeds are earmarked for scaling production and customer deployments, backed by a new 80,000 square foot, 10 megawatt facility in Milpitas, California and manufacturing capacity established in Taiwan earlier in 2026. CEO Gavin Uberti said “Now is the time to be aggressive. Our chips work, people want them,” and that it is time to ship.
The round matters as a read on where AI compute spending is heading. Training demand built Nvidia’s position, but inference is the workload that scales with usage rather than with model releases, and it is the part of the bill enterprises see every month. That a memory supplier, SK Hynix, invested directly alongside Sequoia is a second signal: the supply chain is placing bets on which inference architectures will consume its capacity through the rest of the decade.