Etched’s valuation doubles to $21B in a month
Jane Street has installed Etched's first shipped AI cluster system, and was so impressed, it led another massive round, the startup says.
Etched, an AI hardware startup, has seen its valuation double to $21 billion in just one month. The company, which was last valued at $5 billion in December, raised an additional $700 million in funding led by Jane Street, a prominent quant fund. Jane Street tested and purchased Etched's AI hardware, which prompted the valuation surge.
In July, Etched had already raised a $300 million Series C round, bringing its valuation to $10.3 billion. The company delivers its AI technology as full systems, dubbed "frontier inference clusters." Etched's unique technology lies in its two newly designed components that speed up inference, the computing process that occurs after a user submits a prompt.
The prefill phase involves understanding the prompt and its context, while the decode phase generates the actual output tokens, or the answer seen by the user. Etched has developed a prefill chip that operates at low voltage, enabling it to fit more transistors and process tokens faster than competitors. Additionally, the company has created a new type of memory called cluster-scale memory, which allows multiple chips to connect and use a shared memory pool at low latency.
This innovation promises higher speeds and lower costs. Jane Street, the leading investor in this round, stated that they tested Etched's chip and were impressed by the early results, expressing enthusiasm for the startup's approach to inference, which can support demanding workloads.
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