Etched raises $700 million at $21 billion valuation

Etched raises $700 million at $21 billion valuation

Wed, August 19, 2026 at 3:55 PM GMT+3 2 min read

Etched raised $700 million at a $21 billion valuation on Tuesday, with quantitative trading firm Jane Street leading the round and also becoming the company's first paying customer.

The funding comes roughly a month after Etched closed a $300 million Series C at a $10.3 billion valuation, according to Reuters. Other participants in the new round include Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global, Bain Capital Ventures, Neo, Primary, Stripes, Positive Sum, and Blackstone, the company said.

Etched shipped its first rack to Jane Street last month, and the trading firm is deploying the technology in its workloads. "We tested the chip and are pleased with the early results," Jane Street said in a statement. "Etched's unique approach to inference delivers the precision we will need to support our most demanding workloads."

The San Jose company builds AI inference clusters — full rack-scale systems designed to run AI models faster and at lower cost. Its hardware is built around two technologies: Low Voltage Inference, which the company says delivers higher compute density within the same power envelope as existing hardware, and Cluster Scale Memory, a memory subsystem that creates a shared pool across an entire cluster rather than a single chip.

Etched co-founder and CEO Gavin Uberti said in a statement that getting hardware into customers' hands had been a priority from the start. "Now, we're sprinting on scaling production for the rest of our customers," he said.

Beyond Jane Street, the company said it has secured more than $1 billion in customer contracts spanning public and private AI companies and cloud providers. Its systems are already running large mixture-of-experts models and non-transformer architectures, the company said.

Kleiner Perkins Managing Partner Mamoon Hamid, whose firm has also backed Anthropic and Databricks, framed the market opportunity in terms of efficiency. "The winners will be measured by tokens per dollar and per watt," he said in a statement.

Etched achieved first-pass silicon success in under three years from its seed round, the company said. It emerged from stealth in June with more than 400 employees and a working chip. Total capital raised now stands at $1.9 billion, with backers including Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Jane Street, SK Hynix, and Peter Thiel, among others.

Not everyone is convinced the momentum will hold. Cerity Partners partner Michael Ashley Schulman offered a note of caution, telling Reuters: "Semiconductor history is littered with brilliant chips that never became great businesses."