Etched raises $120M Series A to scale Sohu transformer ASIC

Etched/Sohu

Etched raised $120M in Series A funding led by Primary Venture Partners and Positive Sum Ventures. Founders Gavin Uberti and Chris Zhu, both Harvard dropouts, are building Sohu, an ASIC designed to run transformer inference at 20x the speed of GPU systems.

• Series A led by Primary Venture Partners and Positive Sum Ventures, with participation from Peter Thiel, Replit CEO Amjad Masad, and ex-GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke
• Sohu targets the decode phase of inference, where latency matters most for interactive AI
• Competing against NVIDIA, which dominates with general-purpose GPUs but cannot optimize fully for a single task