Etched doubles its valuation to $21 billion in less than a month

The inference chip startup raised an additional $700 million under Jane Street's leadership, after the quantitative fund tested and then purchased its hardware.

Etched has just closed a $700 million round table, bringing its value to $21 billion, almost 11 billion more than a month earlier. The operation is led by Jane Street, a quantitative fund that first evaluated the start-up's equipment before purchasing it and then investing. The trajectory is dizzying: the company was worth 5 billion in December, then 10.3 billion after a series C of 300 million closed in July.

According to its co-founder and director of operations Robert Wachen, investor enthusiasm is based on two zero components designed to speed up inference, i.e. the calculation that follows a request sent by the user. The first is a low-voltage pre-filling chip, which allows for more transistors without the usual thermal dissipation problems. The second combines a new type of memory and a dedicated interconnection for the decoding stage, which the company calls cluster-scale memory: many chips can thus share a same memory pool with very low latency.

This positioning illustrates the shift of capital towards the inference infrastructure, as the cost of running the models weighs more than that of training them.