Etched Closes $700M Funding Round, Valuation Skips to $21B
· Business · TechCrunch
Etched, a US AI hardware startup, raised $700 million in a round led by Jane Street, pushing its valuation from $10.3 billion in July to $21 billion. The funding was announced on Tuesday and follows a $300 million Series C that set the prior valuation. Company co‑founder and COO Robert Wachen explained that the new round was driven by Etched’s two custom chips – a low‑voltage prefill chip and a cluster‑scale memory system for the decode phase – which are said to boost inference speed and lower cost. Etched claims its frontier inference clusters now run any frontier model, breaking from its original model‑specific design. Other investors in the round include Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Blackstone, among others. The round was welcomed by Jane Street, which tested the chips and announced that it will operate a new rack in its data centre.
Why it matters
The rapid rise in valuation signals growing confidence in AI‑hardware startups and may accelerate the deployment of inference‑intensive models by firms that need cheaper, faster computing resources.
Read the original report — TechCrunch
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