Bain Capital Ventures

Etched Raises $700M, Valued at $21B

Etched announced a $700 million funding round that values the AI-hardware startup at $21 billion, led by quant firm Jane Street, which tested and purchased Etched’s hardware. The raise follows a rapid increase in valuation from $5 billion in December and $10.3 billion in July. Etched sells full AI systems it calls "frontier inference clusters" and says it built a low-voltage prefill chip and a new cluster-scale memory/interconnect to accelerate inference (prefill and decode phases), aiming for higher speed and lower cost. Investors include major venture firms such as Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global, Bain Capital Ventures and others.

Decagon Hits $100M ARR, Rejects Forward-Deployed Engineers

Decagon, an AI customer service startup led by CEO Jesse Zhang, told the reporter it has crossed $100 million in annualized revenue. The three-year-old company differentiates itself by avoiding reliance on forward deployed engineers (FDEs), arguing that a product that’s quick to customize and requires minimal services wins enterprise customers. The article positions Decagon against larger competitors — named Sierra (with CEO Bret Taylor) and Salesforce — noting Sierra has surpassed $200M ARR and Salesforce’s Agentforce exceeded $1B ARR and that Salesforce agreed to buy Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B. Decagon’s investors include Bain Capital Ventures, Accel, and a16z.

The Human Layer of AI: Why we’re continuing to invest in Simile

Simile is building an AI simulation platform for human decision-making, turning cutting-edge research into an enterprise-ready way to test real customer behavior before going to market.