U.S. semiconductor startup Etched has raised $700 million at a valuation of $21 billion, more than double the figure recorded during its previous financing round in July, Qazinform News Agency correspondent reports.
Jane Street led the latest investment, with Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Tiger Global also participating. The funding comes roughly four weeks after Etched raised $300 million in a Series C round that valued the company at $10.3 billion. Including the latest financing, Etched has raised $1.9 billion since its founding.
Based in San Jose, California, Etched develops specialized chips for AI inference, the stage at which an already trained model processes a request and generates a response. As chatbots and other AI services attract more users, companies require increasing amounts of computing capacity to run their models. Etched says its purpose-built systems can complete this work faster and at a lower cost than hardware designed for a broader range of computing tasks.
The company is seeking to establish itself in a market currently dominated by Nvidia’s graphics processing units. Etched and other specialized chipmakers are focusing on the cost and energy required to generate AI output, with performance often measured by the number of tokens, or small units of generated text, produced per dollar and per watt.
Etched said it has secured more than $1 billion in contracts with AI developers and cloud service providers. Jane Street is both the lead investor in the latest round and the startup’s first customer. The trading firm received its first Etched server rack in July and has begun using the equipment in its operations. Etched currently employs more than 400 people and says it has produced a functioning chip.
Earlier, Qazinform reported that U.S. technology company Nvidia had launched the Open Secure AI Alliance, a global technology alliance that brings together around 40 leading companies.