Etched Hits $21B Valuation as Jane Street Leads $700M Round

AI inference chip startup Etched more than doubled its valuation to $21 billion in under a month after raising $700 million led by Jane Street, with participation from top-tier VCs.

Etched, the AI inference chip company, raised $700 million at a $21 billion valuation, more than doubling its price tag from roughly $10 billion just a month earlier. Jane Street led the round after testing the hardware and installing a rack in its own data center. Other participants included Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, and Tiger Global. Unlike traditional chip vendors, Etched now sells full frontier inference clusters rather than standalone chips. The company is betting that specialized silicon optimized for inference will capture a growing share of AI compute spend as agentic workloads and high-volume serving become dominant. The round is one of the clearest signals yet that capital is flooding into the inference layer of the AI stack.