On August 18, Etched announced the kind of week most companies never get: its first rack shipped to Jane Street, and a new $700 million round closed at a $21 billion valuation. Etched posted the news under the headline “From Zero to One.” Four weeks earlier, on July 23, it had raised $300 million at $10.3 billion — the valuation roughly doubled in a month.
Jane Street didn't just lead the round; it tested the hardware first. “We tested the chip and are pleased with the early results,” the firm said. “Etched’s unique approach to inference delivers the precision we will need to support our most demanding workloads.” Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel, Bain Capital Ventures and Blackstone joined them.
Etched builds what it calls frontier inference clusters — chips, racks, software and manufacturing methods designed together as one system rather than assembled from parts. Its A0 silicon came back from TSMC earlier this year, and the company is now validating its first rack-scale product with customers, against more than $1 billion in contracts.
We got to play a part in that story. Aesso, the design and engineering studio in our portfolio, engineered etched.com from VioCorp’s design.
Here's the thing about a machine like this: almost nobody who reads about it will ever stand in front of one. For everyone else, the website is as close as the rack gets. That puts the whole load on the photography — so most of our engineering went into staying out of its way. The first screen arrives as a photograph, not as copy with a picture underneath it. The rack stays whole on a phone instead of being cropped to fit. The site gets out of the machine's way, because the machine is the story.
Congratulations to the Etched team. Zero to one is the hard part.