AI hardware startup Etched announced a new $700 million funding round at a $21 billion valuation, according to a report in TechCrunch. The investment was led by quantitative trading firm Jane Street, which tested and purchased the company's technology.
The valuation jump is exceptionally rapid even within the AI sector. Etched was valued at $5 billion in December 2023. In July 2024, it raised a $300 million Series C at a $10.3 billion valuation. The latest round doubles that figure to $21 billion in the span of a single month.
Etched builds specialized AI inference hardware, which it packages as complete systems called "frontier inference clusters." The company's Sohu chip is designed specifically for running transformer models, the architecture underpinning most modern generative AI.
The substantial investment from Jane Street, a firm known for its rigorous evaluation of technology for trading applications, provided a key validation point for the startup's performance claims.
