AI Chip Startup Etched Doubles Valuation to $21 Billion

AI chip startup Etched doubled its valuation to $21 billion in under a month.

AI chip startup Etched has seen its valuation double to $21 billion in less than a month, following a new funding round. The company raised an additional $700 million, with Jane Street leading the investment after testing and acquiring Etched's AI hardware. This rapid increase in valuation comes after Etched was valued at $5 billion in December and secured a $300 million Series C round at a $10.3 billion valuation in July.

Etched delivers its AI technology as "frontier inference clusters." Co-founder and COO Robert Wachen stated that investor enthusiasm stems from Etched's design of two new components to accelerate inference. These include a prefill chip operating at low voltage, allowing for more transistors without typical heat issues, and a new memory type and interconnect called cluster-scale memory for the decode process. Jane Street, an investor, noted that Etched's approach to inference provides the precision needed for demanding workloads.

Despite early perceptions that its chips were custom-designed for specific models, Etched's systems can now run any frontier model. Other investors in Etched include Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel, Tiger Global, Bain Capital Ventures, Neo, Stripes, Primary, Positive Sum, Diffusion, Argo, and Blackstone.

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