SAN JOSE, Calif., June 30, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Etched, the company building frontier inference clusters, came out of stealth today, announcing a working chip and over $1 billion in signed customer contracts. The company also announced a total of $800M raised across multiple unannounced financing rounds, the latest being $500 million in financing at a $5 billion post-money valuation in December. This includes a strategic investment from VentureTech Alliance, alongside Peter Thiel, Jane Street, Hudson River Trading, Jump Trading, Two Sigma, Stripes, Ribbit Capital, Radical Ventures, Primary VC, Positive Sum and AI luminaries including Andrej Karpathy, Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, Stanley Druckenmiller, Arthur Mensch, Scott Wu, and more. The round signals a deep foundry partnership with the world's leading semiconductor manufacturer. Etched is now ramping production to fulfill the demand for its inference systems.

In under three years from seed funding, Etched has achieved first-pass (A0) silicon success on TSMC's N4P process, and is now validating its first rack-scale product with customers. Today, their inference systems are running models including DeepSeek, Qwen, Mamba, and Llama, and are designed to support models of all shapes and arbitrarily large numbers of parameters.

Etched was founded on the belief that frontier AI will never realize its full economic and societal potential until inference becomes orders of magnitude faster, cheaper, and more abundant. The company built a new class of inference systems, co-designed throughout the entire stack to deliver best-in-class throughput and latency, bending the cost curve and power efficiency of AI in order to unlock inference at humanity-scale.

“We recognized early on that frontier AI would become one of the most economically significant technologies ever created, but that the infrastructure needed to serve those models in a sustainable and economically viable way simply did not exist,” said Gavin Uberti, co-founder and CEO of Etched. “As AI rapidly embeds in every industry and application, the need for accelerated inference infrastructure has never been greater.”

Etched is already ramping production of its rack-scale system. The company has stood up a Taiwan factory and built a data center, test house, and NPI prototyping lab at its San Jose headquarters, putting design, validation, and production under one roof, with a path to gigawatt-scale in 2027.

“Our approach from the beginning has been to build for gigawatt-scale,” said Rob Wachen, co-founder of Etched. “Production is the product. We are living through one of the largest infrastructure buildouts in history, and the companies that matter will be the ones that can translate technology into systems that can be manufactured, deployed, and operated at massive scale. We’re as focused on operations as we are on frontier research.”

Etched has assembled a team of more than 400 people, with most of the company coming from NVIDIA, Broadcom, Google TPU, SK Hynix, HFT quant firms and other organizations responsible for building the systems powering today’s inference.

“We've long believed inference would be one of the defining trends in AI,” said Ken Fox, Founder and Partner at Stripes. “When looking for an outlier team building an amazing product in this massive market, Etched was special on every count. Gavin and Rob have resourced an incredible team around the ambition, including leaders from NVIDIA, Google's TPU program, and Broadcom, who left the best roles in technology to build the entire system rather than just one piece of it. The team has moved even faster than we thought possible since we led the series B, and is now working with hardware and bringing up performance with customers. We're more excited than ever about the future of Etched, and can't wait for what's ahead.”

About Etched

Etched builds frontier inference clusters designed to make AI inference dramatically faster, cheaper, and more abundant. Through deep co-design across the entire stack, Etched's rack-scale systems deliver best-in-class throughput and latency. Etched has raised $800 million from investors including VentureTech Alliance, Peter Thiel, Jane Street, HRT, Jump Trading, Two Sigma, Ribbit Capital, Stripes, Radical Ventures, Primary, and Positive Sum. To learn more, visit etched.com.

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Source: Etched