Etched's valuation has climbed to roughly $21B as the AI-inference-chip startup keeps pulling engineers directly out of Nvidia, according to the Wall Street Journal. A three-year-old startup founded by a trio of Harvard dropouts has been able to out-recruit the industry's dominant incumbent. This $700M financing was led by Jane Street, who also was the first customer to receive a shipment of an Etched system. Workloads are now running live for Jane Street today. Brian Schechter, Partner at Primary who led Etched's seed round, shared his insights on the milestone and the core learnings from watching Etched execute at a record pace for a chip startup. (Wall Street Journal)
Private Companies
Anthropicother
Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate surpassed $65B at the end of July, up from $47B in May and $9B a year earlier, with second-quarter revenue of $11.5B — a fourteen-fold jump from $787M a year ago — and positive adjusted operating income for the quarter. The growth curve underpins the company's push toward an IPO as soon as September or October at a valuation topping $2T, which would make it the largest listing in stock market history. (Bloomberg)
Velaura AIfundraise
Velaura AI raised $110M in a Series A led by Seligman Ventures, with Capricorn Investment Group joining existing backers Samsung Catalyst Fund, StepStone Group, and Maverick Silicon, pushing its valuation past $1B. The company, rebranded from Auradine in March, builds low-power chip designs for AI data centers and physical-AI workloads under its Titan Core platform — a bet that power, not raw compute, is now the binding constraint on data center buildouts. (Reuters)
Public Markets
SanDisk jumped after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the administration opposes Apple buying memory chips from China's CXMT and YMTC, steering phone-maker demand back toward Western NAND suppliers, the same day SanDisk's New Business Model contracts were reported to lock in a $93.9B minimum-purchase floor. Together they read as a structural, not cyclical, shift in memory pricing power. (Tech Times)
Marvell led an AI-networking rally — Credo gained more than 8% alongside it — after a Mizuho supply-chain note flagged a stronger-than-expected ramp in 200G-per-lane optical modules, read as confirmation that co-packaged and near-packaged optics demand is arriving on schedule rather than slipping into 2027. (24/7 Wall St.)
Emerging
Record backing, one deal doing the work: Semiconductor companies participated in startup financings worth more than $250B so far in 2026, with Nvidia alone backing 59 rounds — up from 53 in all of 2025 — per Crunchbase. Over 95% of that dollar total traces to a single check: Nvidia's participation in OpenAI's $122B March round, a reminder that this cycle's headline venture totals are a function of a handful of anchor deals, not broad-based startup demand. (Crunchbase News)