Jane Street Leads Etched’s $700 Million Funding, Then Deploys the Chip Itself
Etched has pulled off one of the fastest valuation jumps in the AI hardware race this year. The startup, which builds specialized computing systems for AI inference, has closed a $700 million funding round that values the company at $21 billion — a figure made even more striking by the fact that Jane Street, the round’s lead investor, is also Etched’s newest paying customer. The Etched $700 million funding round marks the second major valuation jump for the company in barely a month, and it comes with a real-world deployment story attached, not just investor enthusiasm.
Key takeaways
- Etched raised $700 million at a $21 billion valuation, led by quantitative trading firm Jane Street.
- Jane Street became Etched’s first customer and received the company’s first shipped inference cluster rack last month.
- Etched exited stealth mode in June with a working chip and more than 400 staff, and says it achieved first-pass silicon success within three years of its seed funding.
- The company has secured more than $1 billion in customer contracts from AI firms and cloud providers.
- Jane Street separately agreed in April to spend roughly $6 billion on CoreWeave’s AI cloud platform, which will incorporate Nvidia’s Vera Rubin technology.
Etched Secures $700 Million Funding Led by Jane Street
The headline number here is the speed. Etched was valued at $5 billion back in December, then jumped to $10.3 billion in July on the back of a $300 million Series C round. Just weeks later, the Etched $700 million funding round pushed that figure to $21 billion — nearly doubling the company’s worth in roughly a month, according to TechCrunch.
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