Unique Research · Company / financing · June 29, 2023
On June 5, 2023, California chip startup Etched.ai raised a $5.36M seed led by Primary Venture Partners, with MAX Ventures and former eBay CEO Devin Wenig participating — valuation ~$34M. Use of funds: LLM AI accelerator silicon, RTL front-end, and scaling the founding team.
Founded by Harvard dropouts Gavin Uberti (CEO; math olympiad / AI compile) and Chris Zhu (CTO; math/AI HW). Chief Architect Mark Ross (ex-Cypress Semiconductor CTO). Mission: super-intelligence hardware — chips purpose-built for language-model inference.
Design thesis: single chip type for LLMs only (simpler SW stack); keep what matters, drop cache/high-precision paths LLMs don’t need; mature specialized R&D; cost-effective. Context: as Transformers scale, dedicated accelerators rise (DC DLRM ASICs; edge CNNs; Meta’s own DLRM inference chip).
Inspiration: Uberti’s Arm Cortex-M4/M7 work — missing 8-bit MAC SIMD made ops slow; bitcoin mining ASICs as proof specialized silicon can win. On over-specialization risk: GPT-2 vs Llama differ mainly in size and activation for inference purposes.
Product code-name Sohu — large-memory chip; claimed 140× tokens/$ vs NVIDIA H100 PCIe on GPT-3-class workloads. Team hiring; Series A and Sohu launch targeted early 2024.
0 CN images. Author Jiacheng · Review Ski.
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