Etched raises $700m at a $21bn valuation

Etched, which builds inference chips hard-wired for transformer models rather than general-purpose accelerators, said it had raised $700 million in a Series D round led by trading firm Jane Street, valuing the company at $21 billion. That is roughly double the $10.3 billion valuation Etched reached in a $300 million Series C round about a month earlier, in July 2026.

Jane Street was also named as Etched’s first paying customer: the firm tested the startup’s hardware and installed its first shipped cluster system in its own data centre. Jane Street said in a statement that it had tested the chip and was “pleased with the early results.” Etched’s hardware, marketed as the Sohu chip, splits inference into a low-voltage “prefill” component and a separate “decode” component that links many chips over a shared, low-latency memory pool; co-founder and chief operating officer Robert Wachen said the decode design “allows many chips to connect together and use a shared memory pool at a very, very fast, low latency.” Existing backers including Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Tiger Global had previously invested in the company.

The pace of the re-pricing — a doubling in roughly a month — is unusual even by the standards of 2026’s AI-infrastructure funding market, and reflects investor interest in chips built for serving trained models cheaply rather than training them, a category increasingly seen as distinct from general-purpose GPU accelerators. A live paying customer, rather than a pilot or benchmark demonstration, was central to how the round was presented.