Etched raises $700m at $21bn valuation, ships first rack to Jane Street

Etched, a US-based company that builds inference clusters for AI workloads, has raised $700m in a funding round that values the business at $21bn.

The round was led by Jane Street, with participation from Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, Bain Capital Ventures, Stripes, Positive Sum, Tiger Global, Neo, Primary, and Blackstone.

Jane Street, a quantitative trading firm, has also become Etched’s first customer.

Etched shipped its first rack to the firm last month, and Jane Street is now deploying the technology within its own operations.

Jane Street said: “We tested the chip and are pleased with the early results. Etched’s unique approach to inference delivers the precision we will need to support our most demanding workloads. We’re excited to now have our own rack running in our data centre.”

Etched claimed it achieved first-pass silicon success within three years of its seed funding.

The company came out of stealth in June with more than 400 staff and a working chip, before closing a Series C round shortly afterwards. It says it is now developing three generations of hardware at the same time.

Etched co-founder and CEO Gavin Uberti said: “We’ve felt the urgency to get our hardware into customers’ hands and run real workloads since day one.

“Jane Street putting this cluster into production is proof of what we’ve built. Now, we’re sprinting on scaling production for the rest of our customers.”

According to the company, it has secured more than $1bn in customer contracts spanning public and private AI firms and cloud providers.

Etched said its clusters are running large mixture-of-experts models and non-transformer designs, supported by two technologies it calls Low Voltage Inference and Cluster Scale Memory.

Alongside its investment in Etched, Jane Street had previously agreed in April to spend approximately $6bn to use CoreWeave’s AI cloud platform.

Under an expanded partnership between the two companies, CoreWeave will provide Jane Street with computing infrastructure across multiple data centre locations. The infrastructure will incorporate Nvidia’s Vera Rubin technology.