Quant-trading firm Jane Street led a $700 million funding round for Etched, the AI inference chip startup founded by Harvard dropouts. The investment values the firm at $21 billion, more than doubling the $10.3 billion valuation it reached after raising $300 million in July. Etched has delivered its first operational server rack to Jane Street and reports approximately $1 billion in customer contracts.
The company builds specialized hardware for AI inference to compete with Nvidia's infrastructure used to run models at scale. Etched brought its test chips from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing to operational workloads in 44 days, compared to a typical industry timeframe of six months or more. To design its servers, the startup recruited former Nvidia systems engineer Brian Loiler and about a dozen other engineers from the semiconductor giant.
Key sources
- SOURCE@jasonrshuman“participation from @kleinerperki…”x.com
- SOURCE@wsj“has its own in-office data center”x.com
- SUPPORT@techmeme“up from $10.3B after raising $300M in July”x.com
- SUPPORT@wallstengine“the company says it has roughly $1B in customer contracts”x.com
- SUPPORT@michaeljburry“took just 44 days after getting its test chips back from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing to have them up and running inference workloads”x.com
- SOURCE@sonyatweetybird“recruiting the crème de la crème of the semis world”x.com
- SUPPORT@brendanfoody“The pace of execution is unparalleled”x.com
- SUPPORT@a16z“Jane Street, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, A16Z, Peter Thiel, BCV, and Blackstone”x.com