Etched Duplicates Valuation to $21B After $700M Raise Led by Jane Street

On Tuesday, AI hardware startup Etched revealed it has secured $700 million, achieving a valuation of $21 billion, primarily driven by Jane Street, which had previously evaluated and acquired Etched's chips. This represents a dramatic rise from $10.3 billion in July and $5 billion in December, showcasing an increase of almost $11 billion in just one month. Etched specializes in 'frontier inference clusters' designed to enhance inference speed, with co-founder Robert Wachen detailing the processes of prefill and decode. The firm has developed a low-voltage prefill chip and 'cluster-scale memory' to boost efficiency. Key investors include Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, and Peter Thiel, while Jane Street commended Etched's accuracy for high-demand tasks and runs its own rack in its data center.