On paper, Etched sounds like a lot of hot artificial-intelligence startups: Co-founded by three Harvard dropouts in their early 20s, it has quickly raised nearly $2 billion on the strength of a product that was just an idea four months ago. Unlike most of those other startups, however, Etched doesn’t make software but semiconductors, a product category whose high capital costs and long development cycles have relegated it to a corner of Silicon Valley where experience still trumps youthful ambition. Among tech investors, the prevailing wisdom was “don’t back the kids in chips,” said Sonya Huang, a general partner at Sequoia Capital, which led the company’s $300 million Series C round. “There was a sense that these kids think they can do anything, and maybe on the internet, they can, but that in chips, startups are guilty until proven innocent.”

Full report : AI inference chip startup Etched raised $700 million led by its new server rack customer Jane Street at a $21B billion valuation, up from $10.3 billion after raising $300 million in July.