Etched Valuation Hits $21 Billion Following Jane Street Investment

Etched announced Tuesday it has raised $700 million in a funding round led by Jane Street, bringing the company's valuation to $21 billion, according to TechCrunch. The valuation represents a significant leap from $10.3 billion during a $300 million Series C in July and $5 billion in December.

Jane Street, a quant fund that tested the hardware before leading the round, stated in a blog post that Etched's approach to inference provides the precision required for its most demanding workloads. The firm confirmed it now has a rack of the hardware running in its own datacenter.

Etched provides "frontier inference clusters," which Robert Wachen, co-founder and COO, told TechCrunch are designed to optimize the two stages of inference: prefill and decode. To accelerate these processes, Etched developed a low-voltage prefill chip to increase transistor density without overheating, as well as a "cluster-scale memory" interconnect that allows multiple chips to share a memory pool with low latency. Wachen claims these innovations result in lower costs and higher speeds.

While the company previously focused on etching specific models into its chips, it now asserts its systems can run any frontier model. Other investors in the company include Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, Peter Thiel, Tiger Global, Bain Capital Ventures, Blackstone, Neo, Stripes, Primary, Positive Sum, Diffusion, and Argo.