Etched, operating from the domain name Etched.com, has secured $120 million dollars in Series A funding from investors such as Peter Thiel, Github CEO Thomas Dohmke, and Balaji Srinivasan, former CTO at Coinbase Inc.
The company was founded in 2022 and creates specialized chips (ASIC) for language transformer models, such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Its first product, Sohu, is a custom chip that claims to beat Nvidia’s H100 GPU by an astonishing 20x factor.
The fun story is that the company started with the domain name Etched.ai and acquired the domain Etched.com from domain investor and entrepreneur Brent Oxley.
Brent Oxley, an Escrow-awarded top 10 broker in 2023, listed the domain Etched.com for sale at NamesCon in 2018 but it wasn’t until late December 2023 that he apparently sold the domain to Etched for an undisclosed amount.
With Sohu, Etched aims at providing a substantially cost-effective and energy-efficient AI product that is also faster than the competition’s products.
Etched is expected to compete with Nvidia and AMD in a market that increasingly demands more crunching power at a lower cost and their Sohu product has the potential to become a catalyst in the AI race.
