Etched, the Harvard dropouts’ AI chip startup, has raised a whopping £300 million and boasts a valuation of £10.3 billion, despite initial skepticism.

The company claims its chips can run any AI model, including non-transformer architectures like Mamba, and promises lower costs through innovative prefill and cluster-scale memory designs.

With famous investors like Peter Thiel on board and a list of early customers eager to try the hardware, Etched seems unfazed by doubters. CEO Gavin Uberti reflects on the startup’s journey from sleeping in friends’ garages to running a 2 megawatt data center.

This latest funding round comes seven months after Etched was valued at £5 billion, doubling its valuation and setting a new record for Sequoia-led Series C deals. The company has already booked £1 billion worth of orders and is preparing to scale up production of its rack systems.