Finance18 August, 20262 min read
Etched Raises $700 Million at $21 Billion Valuation After Jane Street Tests Its AI Hardware
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Etched raises $700 million at a $21 billion valuation led by Jane Street. Jane Street tested and purchased Etched AI hardware before leading the round.
Etched’s $700M Series D
AI chip startup Etched raised $700 million at a $21 billion valuation in a round led by Jane Street, after the quant trading firm tested and purchased Etched’s AI hardware. The latest financing doubled Etched’s valuation from $10.3 billion in July, when the company raised a $300 million Series C, and it also followed a $5 billion valuation in December.
Etched said it sells full systems it calls “frontier inference clusters,” and it splits inference into two stages: “prefill and decode.” Co-founder and COO Robert Wachen told TechCrunch that “Inference is built in two stages,” referring to the “prefill and decode” design that Etched says speeds up inference after a user submits a prompt.
Jane Street tests, then leads
Jane Street’s role in the round was unusual because it moved from testing to buying to leading the financing, and it said it was “pleased with the early results” from Etched’s hardware. In its blog post announcing the round, Jane Street said, “We tested the chip and are pleased with the early results,” and it added that “Etched’s unique approach to inference delivers the precision we will need to support our most demanding workloads.”
Etched also said Jane Street received its first server rack last month and is now deploying the technology in its own workloads, with the firm quoting that it is “excited to now have our own rack running in its datacenter.” TechCrunch reported that Etched’s valuation step-up came after investors doubled its valuation to $21 billion, up nearly $11 billion in a month, following the $300 million Series C at a $10.3 billion valuation in July.
Production ramp and rivals
Etched said the funding is meant “to accelerate production,” and the company framed the work ahead as building new factories, global supply chains, fleet software, and “self-improving kernel agents” as it ramps toward “Gigawatt-scale.” The round also put Etched’s inference-focused approach in direct comparison with Nvidia, which TechCrunch described as calling its full systems “AI factories,” while Etched delivers “frontier inference clusters.”
Etched’s investors list in the reporting includes Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel, Tiger Global, Bain Capital Ventures, Neo, Stripes, Primary, Positive Sum, Diffusion, Argo, and Blackstone, alongside Jane Street. In addition to the $700 million Series D, the coverage tied Etched’s progress to silicon and manufacturing milestones, including that it reported first-pass silicon success on TSMC’s N4P process and operates a 2-megawatt data center at its San Jose headquarters.