Etched Doubles to $21 Billion in a Month as Jane Street Leads $700 Million AI Chip Round

The quant giant Jane Street tested Etched's inference hardware, then led a $700 million round that doubled the chip startup's valuation to $21 billion - an $11 billion jump in a single month.

The fastest valuation jump in the AI chip race just happened. Etched, the San Francisco startup building specialized inference hardware, announced Tuesday it has raised another $700 million at a $21 billion valuation, led by the quant trading firm Jane Street - which tested the startup's systems and then installed its own rack of the chips, TechCrunch and SiliconANGLE reported.

The speed of the step-up is what's turning heads. Etched was worth $5 billion in December, raised a $300 million Series C at $10.3 billion in July, and has now doubled again to $21 billion - a gain of nearly $11 billion in a single month.

Etched sells what it calls "frontier inference clusters," full systems built around two chips it designed from scratch: a low-voltage "prefill" processor that packs in more transistors to chew through prompts faster, and a decode-side design built on a shared, cluster-scale memory pool. The company says its math blocks run at under half the voltage of most accelerators, delivering more speed at lower cost.

Jane Street put it plainly in the announcement: "We tested the chip and are pleased with the early results." Other backers include Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel, Tiger Global, Bain Capital Ventures and Blackstone.