Gavin Uberti is the co-founder and CEO of Etched, the San Jose startup building specialized AI inference hardware. At roughly 25 years old, he runs a company valued at $10.3 billion, backed by Sequoia, with more than $1 billion in booked orders, four years after leaving Harvard with no product, no chip, and a thesis most of the semiconductor industry considered naive.
Chip startups are usually founded by industry veterans: Cerebras came from an AMD vice president, Groq from the creator of Google's TPU program. Uberti's outlier status, a recent dropout taking on Nvidia, is exactly what made Etched a story long before it was a business.
The Harvard years and the compiler detour
Uberti enrolled at Harvard pursuing a bachelor's in mathematics and a master's in computer science at the same time. Along the way he interned at machine-learning startups including Xnor.ai and OctoML, and it was compiler work, the unglamorous software layer that translates AI models to run on hardware, that showed him how much performance general-purpose GPUs leave on the table.
In 2022 he and classmate Chris Zhu, joined by Robert Wachen, dropped out to found Etched around one conviction: transformer models were becoming the dominant AI architecture, and silicon specialized for them would beat general-purpose chips on speed and cost. CNBC covered the bet when it still looked reckless.
Surviving the skepticism
The years between founding and validation were long. Betting a whole company on one model architecture invited ridicule, especially while Nvidia's GPUs answered every AI workload and custom silicon carried a graveyard of failed challengers. Uberti's team kept building through the doubt.
Validation arrived in stages: a $120 million Series A in June 2024, first chips successfully manufactured by TSMC, systems in customer testing, $1 billion in booked orders, and a $500 million round at a $5 billion valuation in December 2025.
The $10.3 billion moment
In July 2026, Etched closed a $300 million Series C at a $10.3 billion valuation, which TechCrunch reports is the highest valuation ever for a Sequoia-led Series C. We broke down the round and what it signals for inference economics in our coverage of the raise.
The company now employs about 400 people and demos its hardware privately to researchers and investors, a scarcity strategy that converted names like Andrej Karpathy and Geoffrey Hinton from skeptics into people who have tried the systems in person.
What founders can learn from him
Uberti's core lesson is about timing conviction: he committed to the transformer thesis years before the market confirmed it, accepting that being early looks identical to being wrong for a long stretch. Skepticism, as our coverage put it, is not a verdict; it is a stage.
The second lesson is scope. Etched did not try to out-Nvidia Nvidia across every workload; it picked one economically explosive slice, inference, and built everything around winning that slice. Narrow and deep beat broad and shallow, a pattern that repeats across the startups we profile.
Frequently asked questions
Who is Gavin Uberti?
Gavin Uberti is the co-founder and CEO of Etched, an AI chip startup valued at $10.3 billion as of July 2026. He dropped out of Harvard in 2022, where he was pursuing a concurrent bachelor's in math and master's in computer science.
How old is Gavin Uberti?
Uberti is roughly 25 years old as of 2026, making him one of the youngest CEOs of a multi-billion-dollar semiconductor company in the industry's history.
What did Gavin Uberti do before Etched?
He studied math and computer science at Harvard and interned at machine-learning startups including Xnor.ai and OctoML, where compiler work exposed him to the hardware inefficiencies that inspired Etched.
Who co-founded Etched with Uberti?
Uberti founded Etched in 2022 with Chris Zhu, now CTO, and Robert Wachen, now COO. All three left Harvard to start the company.