AI推理芯片初创公司Etched因其专用推理基础设施技术获得投资方高度认可，已完成三轮融资且估值快速上升[1]。该公司2024年完成A轮融资1.2亿美元，由Primary Venture Partners领投，随后于2025年底获得B轮融资5亿美元，由Stripe领投，彼时估值达到50亿美元[1]。2026年7月，Etched再度完成C轮融资3亿美元，由Sequoia Capital领投，估值飙升至103亿美元[1]。
Etched已成功流片A0芯片，并通过创新技术大幅提升推理性能[1]。该公司的Sohu芯片推理速度达到每秒50万token，相当于8个NVIDIA H100芯片服务器性能的20倍[1]。截至目前，公司已获得超过10亿美元的客户合同，首批机架将于今夏发货，已全面启动量产[1]。
Etched, a specialized AI inference chip company, has completed its Series C funding round at a $10.3 billion valuation, validating the commercial potential of dedicated inference infrastructure technology [1]. The company raised $300 million in this latest round led by Sequoia Capital in July 2026, following a Series B of $500 million at a $5 billion valuation in late 2025 and an initial Series A of $120 million in 2024 [1].
The startup has achieved significant technical milestones that differentiate its offering from mainstream GPU providers. Etched's Sohu chip delivers inference speeds of 500,000 tokens per second, representing a 20-fold improvement over eight H100 GPU servers [1]. The company has successfully taped out its A0 chip and secured customer contracts exceeding $1 billion in value [1]. First-generation racks are scheduled to ship this summer as the company scales into full production [1]. These capabilities have been enabled through innovations including low-voltage inference (LVI) and cluster-scale memory (CSM) technologies [1].
Market demand for specialized inference acceleration appears robust. The growth in processing requirements is reflected in data from Google's product APIs, which expanded from processing 9.7 trillion tokens monthly in May 2024 to over 3.2 quintillion tokens monthly by May 2026—representing more than a 300-fold increase over two years [1].
