IIT Patna to Silicon Valley: Meet Saptadeep Pal, Indian-American engineer behind US’ $10.3 bn AI powerhouse

When AI startup Etched announced its $300 million Series C raise at a $10.3 billion valuation, the tech and AI community took notice. Backed by elite venture backers, including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Jane Street, Argo, and SK Hynix, the startup presented a bold mandate – to manufacture the application-specific silicon designed to “run the world’s inference.”

Etched also unveiled an 80,000-square-foot, 10-megawatt testing and prototyping facility situated just 15 minutes from its headquarters for managing the surge in transformer compute demands. The decision positions Etched to compete directly with GPU giants like Nvidia by delivering purpose-built, rack-scale inference clusters.