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Etched<\/a> on Tuesday announced<\/a> that it has raised another $700 million at a $21 billion valuation, led by Jane Street after the famed quant fund tested and bought the startup\u2019s AI hardware.<\/p>\n Even by AI standards, this valuation step-up is jaw-droppingly fast. Etched was valued at $5 billion in December. It raised a $300 million Series C at a $10.3 billion valuation in July<\/a>. Now investors have doubled its valuation to $21 billion, up nearly $11 billion, in a month.<\/p>\n Etched delivers its AI tech as full systems that it calls \u201cfrontier inference clusters.\u201d (Etched competitor Nvidia calls its full systems AI factories.)<\/p>\n Co-founder and COO Robert Wachen told TechCrunch that investors are so enthusiastic because Etched has designed two new components from scratch to speed up inference \u2014 the computing process that happens after a user submits a prompt.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cInference is built in two stages,\u201d Wachen said, \u201cprefill and decode.\u201d In the mathematically and compute-intensive \u201cprefill phase,\u201d the system must understand the prompt, including context. In the memory-intensive \u201cdecode\u201d phase, the system generates output tokens, meaning the actual answer the user sees.<\/p>\n Etched created a prefill chip that operates at low voltage, allowing it to pack in more transistors without the typical heat problems of other high-end AI chips. It can therefore process more tokens faster. Etched created a new type of memory and an interconnect for the decode process that the company calls cluster-scale memory. <\/p>\n \u201cIt allows many chips to connect together and use a shared memory pool at a very, very fast, low latency,\u201d Wachen said. The result, Etched promises, is higher speeds and lower costs.<\/p>\n Etched is still battling the perception from its early days that it etches a particular model into its chips, meaning that each chip is somehow custom-designed to run one frontier model. That was its original intention but is no longer the case. Etched\u2019s systems can run any frontier model.<\/p>\n In the blog post<\/a> announcing the new round, investment firm Jane Street said, \u201cWe tested the chip and are pleased with the early results. Etched\u2019s unique approach to inference delivers the precision we will need to support our most demanding workloads. We\u2019re excited to now have our own rack running in our datacenter.\u201d<\/p>\n Other investors in Etched include Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel, Tiger Global, Bain Capital Ventures, Neo, Stripes, Primary, Positive Sum, Diffusion, Argo, and Blackstone.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/em><\/p>\n