AI chip startup Etched doubles valuation to $21 billion
Etched, an AI chip startup backed by Jane Street, has doubled its valuation in under a month to $21 billion. The company raised $700 million led by Jane Street and joined by major venture capital firms like Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, and Tiger Global. The funding reflects growing investor interest in AI infrastructure as demand for inference—using trained models to generate responses—increases rapidly. Etched specializes in building specialized AI inference systems designed to make running these models faster and more cost-effective. The company is part of a wave challenging Nvidia's dominance in the AI chip market. Etched, which had 400 employees and an operational chip as of July, was valued at $10.3 billion during its Series C round earlier that month.
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