Etched formally came out of stealth on June 30, 2026, but the company is less a sudden arrival than a convergence of AI-chip talent, systems engineers, frontier-AI advisers, and compute-hungry investors.

The founding team

The core founding story is unusually young:

  • Gavin Uberti, co-founder and CEO, is a Harvard Thiel Fellow, World Math Champion, Math 55 alumnus, and compiler engineer who worked on the Cortex-M backend for TVM.
  • Robert Wachen, co-founder and president, is also a Harvard Thiel Fellow and previously co-founded Prod and Mentor Labs.
  • Chris Zhu, co-founder, is described by Etched as a Harvard Thiel Fellow, Math 55 alumnus, published high-performance-computing researcher, and former Olympiad combinatorics competitor.

The operating bench

Around the founders is a much older hardware and deployment bench:

  • Mark Ross, CTO, was previously CTO of Cypress Semiconductor, which was acquired for $9.4B. Etched credits him with shipping five systems that generated more than $1B in revenue.
  • Brian Loiler, VP of Platform, spent 22 years at NVIDIA, led platform-engineering teams across NVIDIA, and helped build DGX and HGX systems from scratch.
  • Wayne Cao, VP of Production, led production and supply-chain ramps for 24 products, including the original iPhone, MacBook Air, Pixel, and Chromebook.
  • Saptadeep Pal, VP of ASIC and Architecture, co-founded Auradine and worked on NVIDIA H100/A100/V100 architecture.
  • David Munday, VP of Software, helped build the TPU software team and led research for Project Astra at DeepMind.
  • Tim Perevozchikov, VP of Finance, was ex-VP Quant Trading and Chief of Staff to the CEO at Two Sigma Securities.
  • Ajat Hukkoo, a Broadcom distinguished engineer and former Intel custom-silicon VP, has shipped hundreds of millions of chips across multiple A0 products.

The investor map

Etched says it has raised $800M across four financings. Its institutional backers include Thiel, Jane Street, Two Sigma, Jump Trading, HRT, Ribbit, Stripes, Radical Ventures, Primary, Positive Sum, VentureTech Alliance, and Argo.

Its angels and advisers are a cross-section of frontier AI, semiconductors, trading, and company-building:

  • Frontier AI and research: Tri Dao, Geoffrey Hinton, Andrej Karpathy, Aidan Gomez, Arthur Mensch, Noam Brown, Scott Wu, Fei-Fei Li, Tal Broda, Irwan Bello, Pieter Abbeel, and Stefano Ermon.
  • Company builders and operators: Peter Thiel, Jerry Tworek, Ben Spector, Shivon Zilis, Amjad Masad, Jason Warner, Zach Dell, Kyle Vogt, Scott Belsky, Lachy Groom, Bryan Johnson, Karim Atiyeh, Dylan Field, Jesse Zhang, Moritz Baier-Lentz, and Nikita Bier.
  • Capital and infrastructure: Stanley Druckenmiller, Nikesh Arora, and Yash Patil.

The wager

That network helps explain the wager. Etched is not just selling a chip; it is trying to build a full inference stack for transformer workloads, where latency, throughput, power, supply chain, and deployment all matter. Turing Tree now tracks Etched and key people including Gavin Uberti, Robert Wachen, Chris Zhu, Mark Ross, and Brian Loiler.