Workplace Services & Experience

Etched, founded by Harvard dropouts, has its own in-office data center and has signed quant-trading firm Jane Street as its first customer.

Jane Street disclosed a $990 million bitcoin ETF position as of 30 June, according to an SEC filing. Its largest stake was in BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust. The disclosure came the same week the quantitative trading firm confirmed a $15 billion loss in July, its worst month in roughly a decade. The filing reflects Jane Street's role as a market maker and authorised participant, not necessarily directional investment. The firm previously cut its IBIT stake by 71% in the first quarter whilst building an ether ETF position. Reuters attributed the July loss primarily to Jane Street's stake in Situational Awareness, an AI hedge fund that faced margin calls. Despite the setback, Jane Street has posted over $40 billion in trading revenue this year, surpassing its 2025 record of $39.6 billion.

Etched raises $700M at a $21B valuation and completes first customer delivery to Jane Street. New funding and first customer delivery kicks off a new era for Etched on their march to gigawatt-scale accelerated inference compute. SAN JOSE, Calif., Aug. 18, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) - Etched, the company building frontier inference clusters, today announced $700M in new funding in a round led by Jane Street with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global, Bain Capital Ventures, Neo, Primary, Stripes, Positive Sum and Blackstone at a $21B valuation. Etched also announced Jane Street as the company's first customer. Etched shipped its first rack last month to Jane Street, and the quantitative trading firm is actively deploying the technology into its workloads. Jane Street said, "We tested the chip and are pleased with the early results. Etched's unique approach to inference delivers the precision we will need to support our most demanding workloads. We're excited to now have our own rack running in our data center." Today's announcement follows a period of rapid execution for Etched. The company achieved first-pass silicon success in under three years from seed funding, emerged from stealth in June with a team of more than 400 people and a working chip, and closed a Series C less than a month after at the highest valuation ever for a Sequoia-led round. Now, Etched has doubled in valuation again, delivered its first racks to customers, and is building three generations of hardware in parallel. "We've felt the urgency to get our hardware into customers' hands and run real workloads since day one. Jane Street putting this cluster into production is proof of what we've built," said Gavin Uberti, co-founder and CEO of Etched. "Now, we're sprinting on scaling production for the rest of our customers." In addition to Jane Street's deployment, Etched has secured more than $1B in customer contracts across industries including public and private frontier AI companies and clouds. The inference clusters are already running massive MoE models and non-transformer designs. The product's performance is powered by two central technologies: Low Voltage Inference (LVI), which delivers significantly higher compute density within the same power as existing hardware, and Cluster Scale Memory (CSM), a hybrid memory subsystem that creates a massive shared memory pool across an entire cluster rather than a single chip. These innovations translate to best in class throughput and latency, promising to unlock inference at humanity-scale. "Our first deployment is a small step forward in our mission to run the world's inference," Uberti said. "It took us three years to deliver our first rack from scratch. Our next one will be much faster." AI infrastructure is becoming one of the largest capital buildouts in history, with estimates reaching $7T by 2030. Few investors have had a clearer view of that opportunity than Mamoon Hamid, Managing Partner at Kleiner Perkins. Mamoon has led the firm's investments into AI companies such as Anthropic, Databricks, Together.AI, Waymo, Fal, and more. "Inference is becoming one of the most important infrastructure markets in AI, and the winners will be measured by tokens per dollar and per watt," said Hamid. "Gavin, Rob, Chris, and the Etched team saw this early and have built at a pace rarely seen in semiconductors. Etched has become a formidable supplier of inference compute, and we're thrilled to deepen our partnership." About Etched Etched builds frontier inference clusters designed to make AI inference dramatically faster, cheaper, and more abundant. Through deep co-design across the entire stack, Etched's rack-scale systems deliver best-in-class throughput and latency. Etched has raised $1.9B from investors including Sequoia, a16z, Jane Street, SK Hynix, VentureTech Alliance, Kleiner Perkins, Tiger Global, Bain Capital Ventures, Peter Thiel, HRT, Jump Trading, Two Sigma, Ribbit Capital, Stripes, Radical Ventures, Primary, and Positive Sum. To learn more, visit etched.com. Legal Disclaimer: EIN Presswire provides this news content "as is" without warranty of any kind. Africa Finance Today do not accept any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, images, videos, licenses, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained in this article. If you have any complaints or copyright issues related to this article, kindly contact the author above.