The Two Harvard Dropouts Who raised $800M to take on NVIDIA

Gavin Uberti and Robert Wachen, co-founders of Etched, join us to tell the story of building one of the most ambitious AI chip companies in the world. Three years ago, they were two Harvard dropouts trying to convince skeptics they could build better inference hardware than the largest semiconductor companies on earth. Today, Etched has raised $800M, signed more than $1B in customer contracts, and taped out a working chip designed for the post-ChatGPT era. We discuss why inference may become the largest market in the world, why Etched built an entire rack instead of just a chip, the technical bets behind low-voltage inference and cluster-scale memory, how they recruited industry legends while still in their twenties, the near-death fundraising moments that almost ended the company, and why the future of AI may belong to whoever can produce the most tokens. TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 1:00 Why Nobody Believed Etched Would Work 14:06 Why Inference Is the Bottleneck 22:27 Gavin and Rob’s Origin Stories 33:24 Taking Huge Risks to Move Faster 49:43 Kernels, Compilers, and the AI Stack 1:02:08 Raising $100M to Survive 1:16:00 The Future of Models, Agents, and Intelligence Presented by Ramp: https://ramp.com/invest Sponsored by Vanta, WorkOS, Rogo, and Ridgeline: https://www.vanta.com/invest https://workos.com/ https://rogo.ai/invest https://www.ridgelineapps.com/ ****** Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Positive Sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc #InvestLikeTheBest #Etched #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #AIChips #NVIDIA #Semiconductors #Inference #Compute #AIInfrastructure #DataCenters #Startups #VentureCapital #Hardware #DeepTech