Etched raises $700M led by Jane Street, doubling to $21B and it still only makes one kind of chip
Tech Funding News Sofia Chesnokova ● Covered by 6 sources
Etched just raised $700M and is now valued at $21B. The weird part: it still only makes one kind of chip, and Jane Street is both investor and first customer.
Based on reporting by Tech Funding News, Sofia Chesnokova — read the original for the full story.
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Etched just locked in a $700 million round led by Jane Street, lifting its valuation to $21 billion and effectively doubling it in less than a month. The investor list is a familiar one for the company — Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global, Peter Thiel, Bain Capital Ventures, Neo, Stripes, Primary, Positive Sum, Diffusion, Argo and Blackstone all came back — while Kleiner Perkins joined as a new backer.
The unusual part is that Jane Street wasn’t just writing a check. The firm said it had tested Etched’s chip, liked the early results, and has been running its own rack inside the company. That makes it both lead investor and first production customer, which is about as direct a vote of confidence as a startup can get.
Etched’s own pitch has barely changed since it was founded in 2022 by Gavin Uberti, Chris Zhu and Rob Wachen after Uberti left Harvard. The company builds processors for inference, not training, and its bet is that running already-trained AI models will eventually eat more compute than training them. Wachen splits that work into a compute-heavy prefill stage and a memory-heavy decode stage, and says the prefill chip uses less than half the voltage of ordinary AI accelerators, leaving room for more transistors without overheating.
That matters because Etched is selling systems, not just chips. It says trading firms can get more responses per rack without adding extra cooling, and it already has more than $1 billion in orders. But it still hasn’t announced revenue, so the next job is brutally simple: turn those contracts into working clusters for customers outside its own investor circle.
The company’s timing looks better than it did a year ago. Nvidia’s deal for Groq’s inference technology, Cerebras’ IPO, and a market that has seen fewer independent venture-backed players all left Etched looking like one of the last standalone bets in the space. That’s a nice position to be in, until the orders have to become actual shipped systems.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is what happens when AI hardware starts looking less like a startup story and more like a power center with contracts. Etched getting valued on orders, not revenue, is bold in the Silicon Valley sense and a little absurd in the normal-business sense. But the market clearly likes a company that sells the whole rack, not another chip pitch with nicer slides.
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