AI inference chip startup Etched has raised an additional $700 million at a $21 billion valuation, doubling its worth in a single month as Wall Street trading giant Jane Street leads the round and becomes an early paying customer.
Jane Street becomes anchor investor
Jane Street, the quantitative trading firm, tested Etched's rack-scale hardware and installed a dedicated rack in its own data center before leading the financing. "We tested the chip and are pleased with the initial results," Jane Street said in a statement supplied by the company. "Etched's unique approach to inference delivers the precision needed to support our most demanding workloads."
Valuation nearly doubles in a month
Etched was valued at $5 billion in December 2025. In July 2026 it closed a $300 million Series C at $10.3 billion led by Sequoia Capital. The new $700 million tranche, first reported by TechCrunch, pushes total funding to roughly $2 billion. Backers include Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, SK Hynix, Peter Thiel, Tiger Global, Bain Capital Ventures, Stripes, Primary Venture Partners, Positive Sum, Diffusion Capital, Argo, Neo and Blackstone.
Inside the Sohu inference cluster
Etched, founded in 2022 by three Harvard dropouts, ships what it calls "frontier inference clusters." A low-voltage prefill chip handles the compute-intensive prompt-analysis stage, while a novel cluster-scale memory interconnect accelerates the memory-bound decode stage. The company says the systems can run any modern AI model, from dense transformers to mixture-of-experts architectures such as DeepSeek and Qwen. Etched has more than 400 employees, a 2 MW data center in San Jose and a new 10 MW facility in Milpitas, and its customer contracts have crossed $1 billion.
The round arrives as investors reprice AI infrastructure companies against Nvidia's dominant GPU franchise. Rivals including Groq and Cerebras are racing to lock in inference workloads, and Etched joins a widening cohort of AI chip and infrastructure players attracting multi-billion-dollar cheques.
Reporting based on coverage from TechCrunch, Mezha and The Wall Street Journal.