Nvidia competitor valued at $5B, received $1B worth of AI chip orders

Founded in 2022 by Harvard dropouts Gavin Uberti and Robert Wachen (also Thiel Fellows), Etched recently announced that they’ve achieved a $5B valuation with their latest round of funding. They’ve raised a total of $800M, with their last round being a $500M raise from Stripes in December.

1A Billion in Contracts

They also claimed to have $1B worth of signed contracts for their inference hardware — which is used to serve queries to trained AI models. Inference has become known as the largest bottleneck and cost of doing AI, because the more people use ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude, the more it costs to answer questions.

2How Etched Differs from Nvidia

Unlike Nvidia’s GPUs which can be used for either training or inference, Etched’s chips and integrated racks are specialized for just inference, allowing them to achieve better performance, power efficiency and cost for serving queries.

3Who's Backing the Company

Investors include VentureTech Alliance, Jane Street, Hudson River Trading, Two Sigma and Ribbit Capital. Other investors include Andrej Karpathy (ex-AI director of Tesla / OpenAI), Nobel prize winner Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li and billionaires Stanley Druckenmiller and Peter Thiel.

Assuming that Etched fulfills their signed contracts, this will be the first serious competitor to Nvidia in the hottest market: as AI products get larger, inference is taking over as the main expense of doing AI, even more so than training.