Etched (company)
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Semiconductor |
| Founded | 2022 |
| Founder | Gavin Uberti, Chris Zhu, Robert Wachen |
| Headquarters | Silicon Valley , United States |
| Products | Sohu (ASIC chip for transformer AI models) |
Etched.ai Inc. is a U.S.-based semiconductor startup focused on creating specialized ASIC solutions tailored for artificial intelligence (AI) tasks. Their flagship product, Sohu, represents the first chip specifically engineered for transformer AI models, which are the foundation of large language models such as ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google LLC's Gemini, as well as image synthesis tools like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion.
Established in 2022 by Harvard dropouts Gavin Uberti, Chris Zhu, and Robert Wachen, Etched.ai secured US$120 million in a Series A round in June 2024 to manufacture its debut chips at TSMC. This financing round was co-led by Primary Venture Partners and Patrick O'Shaughnessy's Positive Sum Ventures. Among the prominent backers were former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, investor Peter Thiel, and Replit CEO Amjad Masad.
History
In 2022, Uberti started working on optimizing compilers for AI applications and enlisted his peers Zhu and Wachen to launch a chip enterprise. The founders incorporated their company in Silicon Valley and were early recipients of the Thiel Fellowship.
By March 2023, the startup completed a US$5.4 million seed funding round that valued the business at US$34 million.
Technology
Sohu is produced using TSMC’s 4-nanometre fabrication technology and incorporates fixed-function matrix multiplication circuits designed exclusively for transformer inference workloads. By excluding support for other neural network types in hardware, Etched claims that a server equipped with eight Sohu chips can output over 500,000 tokens per second running Llama-70B, whereas an eight-GPU system using Nvidia H100 GPUs achieves approximately 23,000 tokens per second. According to Uberti, “a single Sohu server can substitute for 160 H100 GPUs,” positioning their chip as a cost-efficient and energy-saving alternative to Nvidia's Blackwell architecture.
Funding
| Date | Round | Amount (US$) | Lead investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| March 2023 | Seed | 5.4 million | Various angel investors |
| June 2024 | Series A | 120 million | Primary Venture Partners, Positive Sum Ventures |
The Series A round also featured participation from Cruise Automation’s co-founder and CEO Kyle Vogt.
Reception
Industry analysts and media have identified Etched as part of a "second wave" of companies developing specialized AI accelerator hardware aiming to rival Nvidia’s versatile GPUs. CNBC underscored the company’s strategic emphasis on transformer architectures, noting that Etched’s future success depends heavily on these AI models maintaining their leading position.