Roughly $11B of value has been added to Etched in a single month. The inference chip startup closed a $700M Series D led by Jane Street that puts its valuation at $21B, after the quant firm’s own tests convinced it to buy in.
The round extends a fast climb from $5B in December and $10.3B in July. Jane Street now keeps an Etched rack in its data center, an endorsement the company treated as the round’s anchor.
Etched sells what it calls frontier inference clusters. The new capital targets two homegrown parts: a prefill chip built to run at low voltage so it can hold more transistors without overheating, and a cluster-scale memory system that ties many chips to a shared, low-latency pool for the decode phase. Both aim to cut the cost and latency of generating tokens.
The company is still shaking off the idea that its chips are hardwired for one model. Co-founder and COO Robert Wachen says the systems handle any frontier model today.
Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel, Tiger Global, Bain Capital Ventures, and Blackstone round out the investor list.
