Etched raises $700M at $21B valuation after Jane Street chip test
The AI hardware startup’s valuation has more than doubled since its $300 million Series C in July.
AI hardware startup Etched has raised $700 million at a $21 billion valuation in a round led by Jane Street, after the quantitative trading firm tested and purchased the company’s systems, TechCrunch reported Tuesday.
The financing more than doubled Etched’s $10.3 billion valuation from a $300 million Series C in July. The company had been valued at $5 billion in December.
Etched sells full AI systems it calls frontier inference clusters. The company says it designed a low-voltage prefill chip as well as new memory and interconnect technology for the decode stage of AI inference.
Co-founder and COO Robert Wachen told TechCrunch the architecture is designed to connect many chips to a shared memory pool with low latency, offering higher speeds and lower costs.
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Etched’s systems can run any frontier AI model, according to the company, a shift from its earlier plan to build chips around particular models.
Jane Street said it was pleased with early test results and had installed an Etched rack in its data center. Other investors include Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel, Tiger Global and Blackstone.