Artificial intelligence hardware startup Etched Inc. has officially closed a $300 million Series C funding round, pushing its valuation to $10.3 billion. The new valuation is more than double the company’s worth in December. The funding round was led by Sequoia, with additional participation from memory supplier SK Hynix Inc., Andreessen Horowitz, Jane Street, and Diffusion.

While dominant hardware providers like Nvidia Corp. design graphics cards capable of handling both AI training and inference, Etched has chosen a different path. By optimizing its silicon exclusively for the inference stage, where trained models answer user queries, the startup aims to deliver a far more efficient design. The company intends to ship its processor inside integrated hardware appliances that feature custom cooling components and interconnects.

The inference process begins with prefill processing, a step where the model analyzes the meaning of an incoming prompt using massive matrix multiplications. A chip’s ability to execute these hardware-intensive calculations depends heavily on its clock frequency, but traditional GPUs must cap their frequency to prevent overheating. Etched addresses this thermal constraint using a specialized mechanism called Low Voltage Inference, or LVI. By minimizing the processor’s operating voltage, the technology keeps temperatures down and allows the chip to run at higher clock frequencies than standard graphics cards.

Following the prefill phase, the system moves to the decode stage, generating the response one token at a time. To accelerate these decode calculations, Etched utilizes a mechanism named Cluster Scale Memory. This architecture allows every accelerator across an entire rack to share a unified pool of memory. Eliminating the need to distribute duplicate copies of data to individual accelerators streamlines the entire prompt processing workflow.

“The infrastructure required to serve frontier AI sustainably and economically was never going to come from incremental improvements to existing hardware,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Gavin Uberti. “This round reflects a growing industry conviction that the challenge demands a new entrant willing to rebuild the stack from first principles.”

To prepare for its upcoming rollout, Etched plans to begin shipping its first hardware racks this summer. The startup is establishing a surface mount technology production line inside an 80,000-square-foot facility near its San Jose headquarters, which will house both the assembly operations and a prototyping laboratory.