AI chip startup Etched said it raised $700 million in a new funding round that values the company at $21 billion, more than doubling its valuation in less than a month. The Series D round, led by trading firm Jane Street, follows a $10.3 billion valuation in a July Series C round.
Etched has now raised a total of $1.9 billion since its inception. The company, based in San Jose, California, builds specialized AI inference systems designed to reduce the cost and improve the efficiency of running AI models. It employs over 400 people and has delivered its first rack to a customer, Jane Street, which is deploying the technology in its workloads.
The funding round includes participation from existing investors Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, and Tiger Global. Mamoon Hamid, managing partner at Kleiner Perkins, said inference is becoming a critical infrastructure market in AI, with performance measured by tokens generated per dollar and per watt.
Etched has secured more than $1 billion in customer contracts with public and private AI companies as well as cloud providers. The company’s systems aim to challenge Nvidia’s dominance in the AI chip market by focusing on inference, the process of using trained AI models to generate responses.
