Etched

Investment Overview

June 30, 2026

We’re thrilled to have led Etched's $500M Series B at a $5B valuation last December, joined by investors including TSMC, Jane Street, Ribbit Capital, Andrej Karpathy, Fei-Fei Li, and Peter Thiel, and are proud to watch the company come out of stealth today.

At Stripes, we partner with exceptional founders building amazing products in the largest markets in the world. For several years now, much of that work has been in AI, from infrastructure like Crusoe and Databricks to the models and applications like Ramp and Cognition built on top of them. We went especially deep on the layer underneath it all, looking at dozens of companies across compute, because we believe inference is one of the defining trends in AI. The more we learned, it became clear that Etched has the rare combination we always look for: an amazing product in a massive market with strong tailwinds, an outlier team, and a business model built to last.

We believe Etched is on track to build a generational business. The ambition is enormous: deliver the highest-performance, full rack-scale system for AI inference, designed to outperform the best on the market. Rather than build one component and hope the rest catches up, Etched co-designs the whole system at once. That depth stands behind two core technologies: Low Voltage Inference, which delivers roughly an order of magnitude more throughput in the same energy footprint as today’s hardware, and Cluster Scale Memory, which keeps the system fast and responsive at scale.

The team behind it is extraordinary. It is genuinely rare for founders in their mid-twenties to attract talent this senior: leaders from NVIDIA, Google’s TPU program, Broadcom, and SK Hynix left the most coveted roles in technology to go all-in behind Gavin Uberti and Robert Wachen. Gavin is a generational technical talent and Rob a relentless builder, and together they've grown a team that now stands at 350 people around a single mission. They’ve answered with execution, from founding to working hardware in bring-up in just a few years.

And the market is already pulling it forward. In our diligence, customers told us Etched was the first system that could truly transform their inference economics at scale. Production is underway against hundreds of millions in customer contracts, with a clear path to gigawatt-scale next year. For this team, production isn’t what happens after the product. Production is the product.

Etched comes out of stealth today alongside its $800M raised across multiple rounds. An amazing product, an exceptional team, and a market that needs it: this is exactly the kind of company we exist to partner with. Stripes couldn’t be more excited to back Gavin, Rob, and the entire team.