Etched has raised $700 million in new funding at a $21 billion valuation as the AI semiconductor company moves from chip development into customer deployments, with Jane Street becoming its first customer and more than $1 billion of contracts already secured across AI companies and cloud providers. The round was led by Jane Street, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global, Bain Capital Ventures, Neo, Primary, Stripes, Positive Sum and Blackstone.
The financing brings Etched’s total capital raised to approximately $1.9 billion and doubles the company’s valuation less than a month after it closed its Series C.
Alongside the funding, Etched announced that Jane Street is its first customer. The quantitative trading firm received Etched’s first rack in July and is actively deploying the technology into its workloads.
Jane Street’s role is notable because the firm is simultaneously leading Etched’s latest investment round and putting the company’s hardware into production.
Etched said it has now secured more than $1 billion in customer contracts spanning public and private frontier AI companies and cloud providers.
The company’s inference clusters are already running large mixture-of-experts models and non-transformer architectures as Etched works to position its hardware specifically around the rapidly expanding AI inference market.
Etched emerged from stealth in June with more than 400 employees and working silicon after achieving first-pass silicon success less than three years after its seed financing.
The company then closed a Series C less than a month later at what it described as the highest valuation ever achieved in a Sequoia-led funding round. Its latest financing has now doubled that valuation again.
Etched is simultaneously developing three generations of hardware as it works to increase production and support additional customer deployments.
Its systems are built around two core technologies. The first, Low Voltage Inference, or LVI, is designed to increase compute density while operating within the same power envelope as existing hardware.
The second, Cluster Scale Memory, or CSM, is a hybrid memory architecture designed to create a large shared memory pool across an entire computing cluster rather than limiting memory primarily to an individual chip.
Etched said the combination is designed to improve both throughput and latency for large-scale inference workloads.
The company is targeting a market that could become one of the largest components of the broader AI infrastructure buildout. Etched cited estimates that total AI infrastructure investment could reach approximately $7 trillion by 2030.
As AI models move increasingly from training into large-scale production use, Etched is betting that inference economics will become a major competitive differentiator, particularly around the amount of AI output that can be generated for each dollar of infrastructure spending and watt of electricity.
The first Jane Street deployment gives Etched a production reference point as the company attempts to scale manufacturing and deliver additional clusters against its existing customer contracts.
KEY QUOTES:
“We tested the chip and are pleased with the early results. Etched’s unique approach to inference delivers the precision we will need to support our most demanding workloads. We’re excited to now have our own rack running in our data center.”
Jane Street
“We’ve felt the urgency to get our hardware into customers’ hands and run real workloads since day one. Jane Street putting this cluster into production is proof of what we’ve built. Now, we’re sprinting on scaling production for the rest of our customers.”
“Our first deployment is a small step forward in our mission to run the world’s inference. It took us three years to deliver our first rack from scratch. Our next one will be much faster.”
Gavin Uberti, Co-Founder And CEO Of Etched
“Inference is becoming one of the most important infrastructure markets in AI, and the winners will be measured by tokens per dollar and per watt. Gavin, Rob, Chris, and the Etched team saw this early and have built at a pace rarely seen in semiconductors. Etched has become a formidable supplier of inference compute, and we’re thrilled to deepen our partnership.”
Mamoon Hamid, Managing Partner At Kleiner Perkins
