Key facts
- AI chip startup Etched's valuation more than doubled to $21 billion in under a month.
- The company raised $700 million in a new funding round led by Jane Street.
- Etched develops specialized AI inference systems designed to run AI models faster and cheaper.
- The company's previous valuation in July was $10.3 billion, and in December it was $5 billion.
- Etched has secured over $1 billion in customer contracts and raised a total of $1.9 billion.
AI chip startup Etched announced on Tuesday that it has raised an additional $700 million, doubling its valuation to $21 billion in under a month. The funding round was led by Jane Street, a trading firm that also tested and purchased Etched's AI hardware. This rapid valuation increase follows a $300 million Series C round in July that valued the company at $10.3 billion, and a December valuation of $5 billion.
Etched designs specialized AI inference systems, which are crucial for the computing process that occurs after a user submits a prompt to an AI model. The company's co-founder and COO, Robert Wachen, explained that Etched has developed a new prefill chip operating at low voltage to process more tokens faster, and a novel cluster-scale memory for the memory-intensive decode phase. These innovations aim to deliver higher speeds and lower costs for AI inference.
While Etched's systems can now run any frontier AI model, the company is still working to overcome early perceptions that its chips were custom-designed for specific models. Jane Street stated that Etched's approach to inference delivers the precision needed for their demanding workloads. The company has secured over $1 billion in customer contracts and has raised a total of $1.9 billion to date.