Etched’s valuation doubles to $21B as Jane Street leads funding round

Etched, a San Jose-based AI chip startup, just pulled off one of the more remarkable funding sequences in recent memory. The company raised $700 million in a round led by Jane Street, the quantitative trading powerhouse, valuing Etched at $21 billion post-money. That figure is more than double the $10.3 billion valuation Etched secured barely weeks earlier in a $300 million Series C. From customer to lead investor The backstory here makes the deal more interesting. Jane Street didn’t just write a large check from the sidelines. The firm received Etched’s first shipped rack-scale AI cluster, integrated it into its operations, and was apparently impressed enough to lead the next funding round. Etched has now raised approximately $1.9 billion in total funding across all rounds. The company has also booked more than $1 billion in orders for its AI inference hardware, suggesting demand extends well beyond its first marquee customer. Why inference chips matter now Etched occupies a specific niche in the AI hardware landscape: purpose-built inference chips. Etched’s pitch is that dedicated inference hardware can deliver meaningful efficiency and performance gains over general-purpose GPUs...