Jane Street-backed Etched said on Tuesday its valuation more than doubled in less than a month to $21 billion, as investors bet on growing demand for specialized chips used to run artificial intelligence models.
The San Jose, California-based company raised $700 million, with trading firm Jane Street continuing its backing by leading the round, joined by Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz and Tiger Global, among others.
The funding highlights growing investor interest in the infrastructure needed to run AI models, particularly as demand surges for inference — the process of using trained AI models to generate responses.
Etched builds specialized AI inference systems designed to make models faster and cheaper to run, joining a growing group of startups seeking to challenge Nvidia’s dominance in the AI chip market.