AI chip startup Etched has closed a 300 million dollar funding round at a 10.3 billion dollar valuation, more than doubling its worth in months.

The Series C round was led by Sequoia, with Andreessen Horowitz, SK Hynix, Jane Street and Diffusion taking part. The company says it is the highest valuation ever recorded for a Sequoia-led Series C.

Etched was founded in 2022 by Harvard dropouts Gavin Uberti, Chris Zhu and Robert Wachen. Its chip is designed from scratch for AI inference, the business of running trained models efficiently at scale.

The startup claims one of its servers can replace 160 Nvidia H100 GPUs. It says it has already booked 1 billion dollars of customer orders, and the chip is being produced on TSMC’s N4P process technology.

Etched employs about 400 people in San Jose, California. The round makes it one of the most valuable AI hardware startups challenging Nvidia’s dominance.