Etched announced that it had raised $700 million at a $21 billion valuation, in a round led by Jane Streetfollowing the quantitative trading firm’s testing and purchase of the startup’s AI hardware. The valuation marked a dramatic escalation for the company, which stood at $5 billion in December and reached $10.3 billion in July, effectively doubling within a month.
Etched delivers its technology as complete systems it terms frontier inference clusters, positioning itself against rivals such as Nvidia. Co-founder and COO Robert Wachen explained that investor enthusiasm stemmed from two newly designed components aimed at accelerating inference, the computation that follows a user’s prompt. He described inference as occurring in two stages, prefill and decode, with the former handling prompt comprehension and the latter generating output tokens.
According to Wachen, Etched built a low-voltage prefill chip capable of housing more transistors without excess heat, alongside a new memory and interconnect system called cluster-scale memory that lets multiple chips share a fast, low-latency memory pool. Jane Street stated it was pleased with early testing results and would now operate its own rack. Other backers include Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz.
Featured image: Credit: Etched
