Today’s Top Talent Pools

Etched, a San Jose-based company building frontier inference clusters, emerged from stealth with $800M raised across multiple rounds — most recently a $500M round at a $5B post-money valuation in December 2025. Backers include VentureTech Alliance, Peter Thiel, Jane Street, Hudson River Trading, Jump Trading, Two Sigma, Stripes, Ribbit Capital, Radical Ventures, Primary VC, Positive Sum, Andrej Karpathy, Geoffrey Hinton, and Fei-Fei Li. The company also disclosed $1B+ in signed customer contracts.

  1. Raghu Balasubramanian in SF (Stealth)

    1. Role: MTS @ Etched (1 yr)

    2. Other Experience: ASIC Design Engineer @ Waymo, Staff Hardware Engineer @ Google, Design & Verification Engineer @ Infineon, UW-Madison MS CS

    3. Description: "Custom silicon for next-generation edge AI systems"

  2. Raghavan Ramadoss in SF (Stealth)

    1. Role: Head of Interface IP @ Etched (1.5 yrs)

    2. Other Experience: Senior Hardware Engineering Leader @ Cisco, Technical Intern @ Qualcomm, Technical Intern @ Intel, Penn State MS Computer Engineering

    3. Description: "Ultra-efficient AI silicon for edge applications"

  3. Shaamil Karim in SF (Co-Founder & CEO @ Atlas Discovery)

    1. Role: Applied AI @ Etched (<1 yr)

    2. Other Experience: Applied AI @ Origin, Founder & CEO @ Diginoor ($1M from Contrary, Polygon), Venture Partner @ Contrary, Dartmouth CS + Econ

    3. Description: "Foundation models to predict patient response to drugs in clinical trials"

    4. Funding: YC S26, backed by OpenAI, Pear VC, Glasswing

  4. Colin Zhao in SF (Potential Founder)

    1. Role: MTS @ Etched (1 yr)

    2. Other Experience: Early Eng & Research @ Cursor, Co-Founder & CTO @ Toppings (50K users, $15M valuation), UCLA CS

    3. Description: Left Etched 1/25

  5. Sathvik Redrouthu in US (Potential Founder)

    1. Role: MTS @ Etched (<1 yr)

    2. Other Experience: Founder & CEO @ Instachip (YC W25, backed by Thiel Fellowship founders, OpenAI staff), Visiting Research Scientist @ TrainLoop, MIT CSAIL Researcher, Caltech BS Math

    3. Description: Left Etched 6/25

  6. Julian Q. in SF (Potential Founder)

    1. Role: Intern @ Etched (1 yr)

    2. Other Experience: MTS @ World Labs, Undergrad Researcher @ Stanford SAIL, Intern @ MosaicML, Eng @ Chord, Stanford BS+PhD CS

    3. Description:

  7. Cat Tang in SF (Stealth)

    1. Role: Core Ops @ Etched (1 yr)

    2. Other Experience: Product Specialist @ Parabola, Summer Associate @ BCG, USC Cognitive Science

    3. Description: "Something new!"

  8. Michelle Wei in SF (Potential Founder)

    1. Role: MTS @ Etched (<1 yr)

    2. Other Experience: MTS @ Modal, MIT CSAIL Researcher, Jane Street FTTP, USA EGOI, MIT BS Math + CS

    3. Description: Left Etched 8/25

  9. Anchal Bhardwaj in SF (Potential Founder)

    1. Role: Core Ops @ Etched (1 yr)

    2. Other Experience: 8VC Engineering Fellow, Harvard CS + History

    3. Description: Left Etched 2026

  10. Artin Kim in LA (Potential Founder)

    1. Role: MTS @ Etched (1 yr)

    2. Other Experience: NLP Researcher @ UCLA Plus Lab, UCLA CS

    3. Description: Left Etched 10/25

Taxwire, a three-year-old New York startup that develops software to automate sales tax coding, rate calculations, and filing workflows across U.S. and international jurisdictions, raised $25 million in combined seed and Series A funding from Headline Ventures, XYZ VC, Vinyl, Recall Capital, and Nomo Ventures.

  1. Yasak Dogra in Canada (Potential Founder)

    1. Role: Founding Engineer @ Taxwire (<1 yr)

    2. Description: Left Taxwire 8/25

    3. Contact: Site

  2. David Moon in Toronto (CEO @ Input Recovery)

    1. Role: Chief of Staff & VP Ops @ Taxwire (<1 yr)

    2. Other Experience: SWE @ Rakuten, WashU BSBA Finance + CS

    3. Description: "Contingent-fee indirect-tax recovery for Canadian entities"

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