Etched is a Cupertino-based semiconductor startup, founded in 2022 by Harvard dropouts Gavin Uberti, Chris Zhu, and Robert Wachen. The company makes a core bet that the transformer architecture will continue to dominate AI, and that a chip built exclusively to run transformers will outperform general-purpose GPUs by an order of magnitude.

That bet is embodied in Sohu, the company's first chip — an application-specific integrated circuit that hard-wires the transformer computation graph directly into silicon. Because Sohu omits all circuitry needed for other neural network types, it can devote far more of its die area to raw matrix math. The result is claimed FLOPS utilization above 90%, compared to roughly 30% on a general-purpose GPU like the H100, where instruction overhead, thread scheduling, and memory management consume the majority of available compute.

Etched raised a $120M Series A in June 2024, co-led by Primary Venture Partners and Positive Sum Ventures.

* Primary is an investor in Etched