Jane Street, the quantitative trading giant, is now the lead investor in Etched, the AI chip startup whose valuation has doubled to $21B in a month.
The $700M round arrives weeks after Etched closed a $300M Series C at $10.3B. Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global and Bain Capital Ventures joined Jane Street, which also became Etched’s first customer and has one of its racks running in its own data center.
Etched builds inference accelerators tuned for transformer models rather than general-purpose GPUs. Its Sohu processor runs math blocks at under half the voltage of rival chips, lifting compute density while cutting heat, and the company ships the silicon inside full racks with custom interconnects and cooling.
The rapid step-ups reflect a shifting market: as AI spending moves from training to serving, inference efficiency becomes the battleground. Around 15% of Etched’s roughly 400 employees previously worked at Nvidia, including systems engineer Brian Loiler, who spent nearly 23 years there before joining in 2024 and recruiting about a dozen colleagues.
Founded in 2022 by Harvard dropouts Gavin Uberti and Chris Zhu, Etched has now raised nearly $2B and counts more than $1B in orders. The company disputes its early reputation for etching a single model into its chips, saying its systems can run any frontier model.
Jane Street said it tested the silicon and was pleased with early results, calling Etched’s approach to inference precise enough for its most demanding workloads.
