Etched secures $700 million, pushing valuation to $21 billion in a month

Etched disclosed a fresh $700 million investment that brings its market value to $21 billion, more than quadrupling the figure from December. The round was headed by Jane Street, which praised the startup’s chips after internal testing and confirmed deployment of a rack in its own data centre. This financing follows a $300 million Series C in July that valued the company at $10.3 billion, and a $5 billion valuation just months earlier.

Etched markets its AI systems as "frontier inference clusters," featuring a low-voltage prefill processor and a novel cluster-scale memory interconnect that together accelerate the two phases of inference—prefill and decode. Co-founder and COO Robert Wachen said these advances promise higher throughput and lower operating costs. The investor roster spans Jane Street, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel, Tiger Global, Bain Capital Ventures, Neo, Stripes, Primary, Positive Sum, Diffusion, Argo and Blackstone.