Chris Zhu is a co-founder of Etched. He studied at Harvard, where he met Gavin Uberti in Math 55, a demanding theoretical mathematics course. He and the other founders left Harvard and received Thiel Fellowships.
Etched was founded in 2022 by Zhu, Uberti and Robert Wachen. It builds Sohu, an ASIC designed for transformer models. Zhu works on the company's large language model accelerator systems.
The company raised a $120 million Series A in June 2024. On 30 June 2026 it left stealth with about $800M raised and a working Sohu chip.
In July 2026 it closed a $300M Series C led by Sequoia at $10.3B. In August 2026 Jane Street led a $700M round at $21B.