2026-09-11 · Fuente：deep-siliconangle.com-p11
Inference chip startup Etched has secured $700 million led by Jane Street, pushing its valuation to $21 billion weeks after a $300 million round backed by Nvidia.
Etched Inc., a startup developing chips specialized for artificial intelligence inference, has raised an additional $700 million in funding, a round that lifts the company's valuation to $21 billion. The announcement arrives only weeks after Etched closed a separate $300 million round that was backed by Nvidia Corp. The newest financing was led by investment firm Jane Street.
Jane Street was joined by a roster of prominent backers: Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global and Bain Capital Ventures all participated in the round, alongside several other investors. The composition of the syndicate — mixing established venture names with non-traditional backers such as Jane Street — reflects the widening investor appetite for chips purpose-built for inference workloads.
The cadence of the two raises is notable: roughly $1 billion in fresh capital secured within a matter of weeks. Few chip startups at any stage have assembled financing on that timeline, and the speed suggests investors are moving quickly to back alternatives to general-purpose GPUs as inference demand from deployed AI services accelerates.
Nvidia's participation in the preceding round adds a striking dimension. Etched's silicon targets inference — the phase of AI computing in which trained models generate outputs — a segment where Nvidia's own accelerators have long set the standard. The incumbent's appearance on the cap table of a specialized inference-chip challenger therefore stands out as an unusual endorsement of the startup's direction.
For AI-compute buyers and investors, the raise signals that capital continues to flow toward inference-dedicated architectures despite the dominance of general-purpose GPUs. With $21 billion in valuation, a Jane Street-led syndicate and Nvidia already among its earlier backers, Etched enters its next phase carrying both the funds and the institutional backing to press its case in one of the hardware market's most contested segments.
Etiquetas: Etched · Inference Chips · Nvidia · Jane Street · Venture Funding · AI Accelerators
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