Etched fields funding offers at $40B+ valuation, sources say — SkimNews
Get the Tech newsletter
Daily tech — startups, AI labs, chips, the launches that shape the next decade. Free.
- Etched is reviewing incoming investment offers ranging from $40 billion (top-tier investors) to $50 billion (lesser-known backers), roughly double its September valuation of $21 billion from a $700 million round.
- Jane Street led Etched's $700 million round and is also a customer that took delivery of an early system; Etched said in July it had secured $1 billion in customer orders including Jane Street after manufacturing its test chip at TSMC.
- Etched claims its proprietary chips process more tokens faster and at lower cost than Nvidia's, with co-founder Robert Wachen telling TechCrunch the company designed two new components from scratch to speed up inference.
- Etched has drawn heavily from Nvidia's talent pool, with roughly 15% of its 400-person workforce previously working at the chip giant, according to the Wall Street Journal.
- Etched operates a 10-megawatt datacenter in Silicon Valley and a facility in Taiwan to coordinate production near TSMC, where it manufactured its test chip this summer.
- Etched's fundraising velocity has accelerated sharply: a $300 million round at a $10.3 billion valuation led by Sequoia closed in July, followed by the $700 million round at $21 billion in September.
- Etched co-founders Gavin Uberti and Chris Zhu met in an advanced math course at Harvard; COO Robert Wachen was Uberti's roommate, and all three dropped out to pursue the company.
Why it matters: Etched jumping from a $21 billion to a $40–50 billion valuation in just two months is the headline, but the more telling signal is that Jane Street — a quant trading firm where microseconds mean millions — both led the last round and is a paying customer. If Etched raises another $700 million, a source says it could bank roughly 3.5 years of runway, buying the four-year-old startup the time it needs to prove its Nvidia-challenging inference chips at scale.
Ask SkimNews
