Robert Wachen

Co-Founder and President @Etched. Co-Founded Prod

[Robert Wachen @robertwachen]

@apartovi @neo @sumersao @Etched So much fun!

[Robert Wachen @robertwachen]

@simile_ai Congrats!! Super exciting

[Robert Wachen @robertwachen]

@Enigma_AI Congrats JJ!!

[Robert Wachen @robertwachen]

@WillGarman1 @zfellows @Etched Haha that was fun!

[Robert Wachen @robertwachen]

@sarahdingwang @Etched @carterjwilcox is truly the best!!

[Robert Wachen @robertwachen]

@juberti @UbertiGavin Love this

[Robert Wachen @robertwachen]

@ypatil125 @UbertiGavin 🙏🙏 just getting started

[Robert Wachen @robertwachen]

@carterjwilcox and I have talked about the inference singularity for a while

Today’s models have clearly hit the tipping point of quality. Now we need new inference hardware for billions of people and long horizon agents to use them

[Sarah Wang @sarahdingwang]

https://t.co/zE5rUAcHva

[Robert Wachen @robertwachen]

@finbarrtimbers Thank you!

[Robert Wachen @robertwachen]

We're at the biggest compute inflection point in history. Etched is moving faster than ever.

I'm incredibly grateful for our team. We've poured our lives into Etched for three years. It's hard to believe how far we've come and harder to believe how far we must go.

There's no better time to join us. We're just getting started.

[Etched @Etched]

We’ve raised $300M in Series C funding at a $10.3B valuation from Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Jane Street, Argo, and SK Hynix.

Our mission is to run the world's inference. This round accelerates production of our inference clusters.

We've opened an 80,000-sqft, 10-MW facility 15 minutes from our office to expedite production and prototyping.

[Robert Wachen @robertwachen]

We often talk about big bets at Etched and there’s no higher conviction investor than @sonyatweetybird and @abhishekm1636

Sonya did over 50 calls with customers, suppliers, and other chip companies before approaching us about working together

Before I knew it I was on a plane with Sonya, @dougleone, and @gradypb talking about what the future of inference clusters would look like. @Alfred_Lin and fifteen people from the sequoia partnership came by our lab, saw the models run themselves, and we decided to partner together

We couldn’t be more excited to be working with Sequoia!

[Sonya Huang 🐥 @sonyatweetybird]

We @Sequoia are leading the Series C in @Etched

Etched has built a beautiful machine in Gen 1. And Gen 2/3/++ will only be faster and more ambitious.

Maximizing intelligence per flop is both insanely fun engineering and an incredibly noble mission. Honored to be on board.

[Robert Wachen @robertwachen]

So excited to work with @sarahdingwang @RaghuRaghuram @DavidGeorge83 @shangdaxu on accelerating inference

We have a long road ahead and wouldn’t want to work on it with any other team

[Sarah Wang @sarahdingwang]

In 2022, months before ChatGPT and years before Cursor, Claude Code and Codex, @UbertiGavin, @robertwachen and @czhu1729 dropped out of Harvard to make a bet that looked, at the time, almost irresponsible: they would build an entire inference system—new chips, boards, interconnects, racks—from scratch.

Etched understands the core insight is that AI workloads don’t run on chips, they run on systems. Winning requires building and scaling the entire system. This is the heart of Etched. As Gavin, Rob and Chris like to say, production is the product.

They’ve paired this insight with unprecedented execution and speed. Etched signed over $1B in customer contracts before shipping a single rack and those first racks are already going out to customers.

Thrilled to share that @a16z is partnering with @Etched to go after one of the defining markets in AI: running the world’s inference.

[Robert Wachen @robertwachen]

@bhorowitz Time to ship some chips!

[Robert Wachen @robertwachen]

@abhishekm1636 @Etched @UbertiGavin Abhishek and I have known eachother since navigating COVID at Harvard together. @fein_mikey and I have tried for many years to get him to join the team… we’re thrilled to have him on team Etched officially now :)

[Robert Wachen @robertwachen]

For a long time my friends @BrendanFoody @bfspector @DLeitersdorf have told me how amazing it is working with @victoralazarte and Diffusion

It’s hard to believe until you experience it - Victor acts like the founder he is - full conviction, immediate responses and ideas, just go go go

So excited to be working together

[victor lazarte @victoralazarte]

Etched is Diffusion's (and my) largest investment to date. I'm excited to be partnering with @UbertiGavin, @robertwachen, @czhu1729, and the @Etched team.

Three Harvard dropouts started Etched in 2022 believing, that "inference is going to be the biggest market in the world. Whoever produces the most tokens is going to be the most valuable company in the world."

Nobody doubted the market. The experts doubted 21-year-olds would be the ones to win it.

They did it anyway. Their first tape-out came back working. Forty days after receiving silicon, they had a full rack running inference. Today: over $1B in signed customer contracts.

Every other AI chip was designed before ChatGPT and retrofit for what came after. Etched is the first built for this era of models: inference rethought all the way down to materials and packaging.

The result runs modern models, from DeepSeek to Mamba, much more efficiently.

The skeptics became believers and the most important companies in the sector are now betting on Etched, including SK Hynix as investors in this round.

Grateful to be a part of the journey.

[Robert Wachen @robertwachen]

@sonyatweetybird @Etched @UbertiGavin Excited to move faster together!

[Robert Wachen @robertwachen]

@willdepue @mercor_ai in a nutshell

[Robert Wachen @robertwachen]

@szeloof Super exciting

[Robert Wachen @robertwachen]

@BSchech @UbertiGavin @Etched Brian - you’ve been our go-to and a steady hand through all the peaks and troughs of building hardware. Thank you for believing in us before anyone did and always pushing us to think bigger :)

[Robert Wachen @robertwachen]

@dhaval_txt 🙏 means the world