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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.

Jane Street hired Citadel Securities' head of semi-systematic equities after a 20-month break. 3 minutes ago Jane Street and Citadel Securities are two of the biggest firms in electronic trading, but they're thought to have very different cultures. It's not often that senior traders cross that divide, but New York-based Theodore Schiffman, who held a number of senior trading roles at Citadel Securities, has just emerged at Jane Street. At Citadel Securities, Schiffman was most recently its head of semi-systematic equities. Before that he was head of options trading. Now, at Jane Street, his role is simply 'trader;' Jane Street did not respond to a request for comment, but it's well known that the firm has a tendency to give its senior people basic job titles. Schiffman has been out of the market on a non-compete since January 2025. Other semi-systematic people left around the same time; we noted that John Harrap, a portfolio manager on the team, left in March 2025. His non-compete is longer, ending in March 2027, and his destination afterwards is as yet unknown. Working at Jane Street won't be an entirely novel experience for Schiffman. He spent over 12 years at Susquehanna, where many of Jane Street's founding team worked before striking out on their own. At Susquehanna, Schiffman was an equity options trader and a pod leader. Schiffman isn't the only trader to switch sides this summer. FINRA's BrokerCheck tool shows that Christopher Laliberte joined Jane Street in May after leaving Citadel Securities in February 2025. He was an equities market making risk trader at Citadel Securities for over five years after joining from Morgan Stanley. Laliberte now works on "electronic equities." As we reported in Morning Coffee today, Jane Street disclosed a $15bn loss for July while raising money for a bond issue. The FT first reported the loss and spoke to "people familiar with the matter," who said Jane Street still made $40m in net revenues for this year through to August 14th. Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you'd like to share? Contact: WhatsApp: http://wa.me/442079977910 (+44 20 7997 7910), Telegram: @AlexMcMurray, Signal: @AlexMcMurrayEFC.88 Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email [email protected]. Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: comments are moderated intermittently by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You must take sole responsibility for comments you post on this site. We will take reasonable steps to weed out anything that we consider to be offensive or inappropriate. The essential daily roundup of news and analysis read by everyone from senior bankers and traders to new recruits. Boost your career. Find thousands of job opportunities by signing up to eFinancialCareers today. Top Articles

Wall Street is quietly loading up on ripple (XRP) ETFs: here's who holds the most. BitMart Insights | 2026.08.17 03:52 2 mins read Although the broader landscape around XRP and the ETFs behind it is nowhere near the peaks from last year, some of the most prominent names on Wall Street have not abandoned it. Just the opposite; the recent SEC filings show that behemoths like Jane Street, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, UBS, and a few others have reported XRP ETF positions. However, there are significant differences in their exposure. Jane Street leads the pack. In its latest Form 13F filed with the SEC at the end of the previous business week, covering holdings as of June 30, Jane Street Group solidified its spot as a leader in terms of XRP ETF adoption. Data shows that the trading giant held more than 1.2 million shares of the Bitwise XRP ETF alone, alongside exposure to other funds from Franklin Templeton, Grayscale, Canary Capital, and 21Shares. The Bitwise product exposure is particularly eye-catching because it holds spot XRP, unlike other ETFs tracking the popular altcoin. Bitwise's product saw the light of day in November, just a few weeks after Canary Capital's ETF hit Wall Street, and has become the largest of the bunch since. The document covers the second quarter of the year, as confirmed by the SEC. The filing contains the company's reportable securities position at the June 30 cutoff. It's worth noting that Jane Street's involvement, since it's one of the largest market makers and actively trades ETFs and options, should not necessarily be regarded as a simple long-term directional bet on XRP, but the scale is still difficult to ignore. Moreover, it held just 20,605 ordinary Bitwise XRP ETF shares at the end of Q1, meaning that there was a significant increase to the 1.2 million shares reported three months later. BoA, Morgan Stanley in it. Bank of America also reported in its latest filing cycle that it held 13,260 shares of the Volatility Shares XRP ETF. However, the position is worth just $76,000, nowhere near Jane Street's exposure. Additionally, the Volatility Shares XRP ETF is not a spot ETF such as Bitwise's financial vehicles. Morgan Stanley also disclosed positions in three XRP-related funds at the end of Q2: 6,715 shares of Franklin's XRP ETF, 255 shares of REX-Osprey's product, and 567 shares of Bitwise's counterpart. These holdings are quite insignificant relative to the behemoth's overall portfolio, but they add to a growing list of institutions reporting regulated XRP exposure. Additionally, Wolverine Asset Management had nearly 200,000 Bitwise XRP ETF shares, Gallacher Capital Management reported 86,744 Capital XRP ETF shares, while Main Street Group and National Bank of Canada had 5,261 and 3,848 shares of XRP-related products, respectively. Disclaimer: The market is risky, and investment needs to be cautious. This article does not constitute investment advice. Users should consider whether any opinions, views, or conclusions in this article are in line with their specific circumstances. Investment based on this is at their own risk.