Etched’s valuation doubles to $21B in a month

Etched on Tuesday announced that it has raised another $700 million at a $21 billion valuation, led by Jane Street after the famed quant fund tested and bought the startup’s AI hardware.

Even by AI standards, this valuation step-up is jaw-droppingly fast. Etched was valued at $5 billion in December. It raised a $300 million Series C at a $10.3 billion valuation in July. Now investors have doubled its valuation to $21 billion, up nearly $11 billion, in a month.

Etched delivers its AI tech as full systems that it calls “frontier inference clusters.” (Etched competitor Nvidia calls its full systems AI factories).

Co-founder and COO Robert Wachen told TechCrunch that investors are so enthusiastic because Etched has designed two new components from scratch to speed up inference — the computing process that happens after a user submits a prompt.

“Inference is built in two stages,” Wachen said, “prefill...

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