AI hardware startup Etched has raised $700 million at a $21 billion post-money valuation, roughly doubling its price in about a month, TechCrunch reports. Trading firm Jane Street led the round, joined by Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel, Tiger Global, Bain Capital Ventures, and Blackstone, along with Neo, Stripes, Primary, and a group of other backers.
The pace of the markup stands out even by current AI standards. Etched was valued at $5 billion in December and $10.3 billion at its Series C in July, meaning the company's price has roughly quadrupled since the end of last year.
Etched sells complete "frontier inference clusters" rather than standalone chips, built around two custom-designed components. A prefill chip runs at low voltage, allowing more transistors to be packed in and tokens to be processed faster, while a decode-side, cluster-scale memory interconnect lets many chips share a common memory pool at very low latency. Co-founder and chief operating officer Robert Wachen says the systems can run any frontier model, a point the company has been keen to make after earlier perceptions that its silicon was tied to specific model architectures.
Jane Street is more than a lead investor. The firm received Etched's first shipped cluster system, installing a rack in its own data center after early test results met expectations, and said the hardware delivers the precision its most demanding workloads require. For a young chip company, a production deployment inside one of the world's most technically sophisticated trading firms is a strong proof point.
Founded in 2022 by a group of Harvard dropouts, Etched first drew industry attention with Sohu, a chip designed specifically for transformer models, and has since broadened its pitch into full inference systems. The new capital arrives as demand for inference compute, the hardware that actually serves AI models to users, continues to outstrip supply across the industry.