AI chip startup Etched has secured another $700 million in funding, lifting its valuation to $21 billion. The round was led by Jane Street, which said it tested the company's hardware before investing.
The new figure marks a rapid rise for the company. Etched was valued at $5 billion in December, then reached $10.3 billion in July. In just one month, its valuation has nearly doubled again, reflecting strong investor interest in specialized AI infrastructure.
Etched builds complete AI systems it describes as frontier inference clusters. The company says its technology is designed to accelerate inference, the stage where AI models process prompts and generate responses.
According to co-founder and COO Robert Wachen, Etched developed two key components from the ground up: a low-voltage prefill chip and a new memory-and-interconnect design for decoding. The company says this architecture can improve speed while reducing costs by enabling chips to share memory with very low latency.
Etched also says its systems are no longer limited to a single model and can support multiple frontier AI models. Jane Street said the early results were strong enough to justify deploying its own rack in its data center.
With backing from major investors including Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz, Etched is positioning itself as a notable player in the next wave of AI hardware. The company's progress suggests a future where specialized computing could make advanced AI faster, more efficient, and more widely scalable.
