Just under a month after announcing a $300 million fundraise, inference chip startup Etched has raised an additional $700 million, in a round led by Jane Street.

According to Etched, Jane Street decided to lead the round after testing the company’s hardware offering, stating that it “was pleased with the early results” and is “excited to have our own rack running in our data center.”

Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global, Bain Capital Ventures, and Blackstone were amongst the participants in the round, which saw Etched’s valuation double to $21 billion.

The July 2026 raise had provided Etched with a $10.3bn valuation, a figure which was already double the startup’s valuation from December following the close of a $500m funding round.

Founded in 2022 by Harvard University dropouts Gavin Uberti and Chris Zhu, the Cupertino-based company announced in June 2026 that it had developed a working inference chip and already signed more than $1bn in customer contracts.

Etched’s chip is comprised of two components designed by the startup from scratch that individually focus on the two phases that make up AI inference: a compute-intensive prompt processing, or ‘prefill,’ stage, and the memory bandwidth-intensive output generation stage, known as ‘decode.’

Produced on TSMC’s N4P process technology, according to Etched, its chip runs at a “much lower voltage than any other AI chip,” meaning it generates less heat and can therefore house more transistors.

The hardware also utilizes an architecture that creates a shared low-latency memory pool across the entire scale-up domain, the company said, adding that its proprietary ultra-low-latency, high-bandwidth interconnect enables “dramatically faster” memory access across chips.

At present, the startup employs around 400 people at its San Jose, California, office, operating a 2MW data center at the site. The startup has also recently opened a new 80,000 square-foot (7,430 sqm), 10MW facility in Milpitas, to the north of San Jose.

“Scaling intelligence requires a new kind of inference hardware,” Etched wrote in a LinkedIn post announcing the raise. “Our mission has never been more urgent.”