Etched's valuation doubles to $21B in a month | TechCrunch

Last day to exhibit your breakthrough to 10,000+ tech leaders at Disrupt is on Oct 2. Book Exhibit Table Now. Disrupt doors open Oct. 13. Get your pass and bring someone with you at 50% off. REGISTER NOW. 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 and decode.” In the mathematically and compute-intensive “prefill phase,” the system