Eliyan hits unicorn status with $145m Series C for AI interconnects
Eliyan Corporation has completed a $145 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation, joining the unicorn cohort among a crop of semiconductor startups betting that AI infrastructure will be defined as much by interconnect bandwidth as by raw compute. The oversubscribed round was led by Seligman Ventures, with strategic participation from Cisco Investments and Lumentum, alongside unnamed new and existing financial investors.
The Santa Clara company develops PHY and chiplet interconnect technologies for AI systems, offering products under its NuLink and NuGear families. These are designed to address what the company describes as the I/O, memory, and power "walls" confronting AI infrastructure at scale. Proceeds will fund development of next-generation interconnect products, expansion of ecosystem partnerships, and manufacturing scale-up.
Umesh Padval, managing partner at Seligman Ventures, will join Eliyan's board of directors. He cited a portfolio of more than 100 patents and 12 strategic investors as factors behind the firm's decision to lead the round. Eliyan did not disclose current revenue, named customer deployments, or the identity of the hyperscale and AI accelerator customers it says are evaluating or deploying its technologies.
The technology case
The strategic logic behind Cisco and Lumentum's involvement points to the broader bet Eliyan is making. The company is expanding beyond its existing electrical interconnect portfolio into electro-optical territory, aiming to cover the full connectivity stack from intra-package die-to-die links through to rack-scale and cluster-scale optical fabrics. Co-packaged optics and high-bandwidth memory expansion are both areas where established networking and photonics vendors have a direct commercial interest in picking winners early.
Chief executive Ramin Farjadrad described AI infrastructure as undergoing "one of the largest architectural transitions in computing history," arguing that traditional system connectivity approaches are reaching their limits as compute, memory, packaging and networking converge. The company was founded by Farjadrad alongside Patrick Soheili and Syrus Ziai.
Market context
The interconnect and chiplet space has become one of the most active funding categories in enterprise semiconductors. Competing approaches are being pursued by a range of players, from UCIe consortium members such as Intel, AMD and Arm, to better-funded startups targeting specific layers of the connectivity stack. The transition to disaggregated, chiplet-based architectures, accelerated by the physical limits of monolithic die scaling, has raised the strategic value of PHY IP and packaging knowhow considerably.
Hyperscalers are simultaneously developing proprietary interconnect fabrics in-house, creating a dual dynamic in which Eliyan must both supply those customers and demonstrate sufficient differentiation to avoid commoditisation. The involvement of Lumentum, a major optical components supplier, suggests Eliyan's electro-optical roadmap is being taken seriously at the module-provider level.
From a standards perspective, the UCIe open chiplet interconnect standard continues to gather industry momentum, and Eliyan's positioning as a silicon-proven PHY vendor places it in the middle of that ecosystem debate. Regulatory exposure is limited at this stage, though US export-control rules covering advanced semiconductor technologies remain a background consideration for any AI chip-adjacent company with international customers.
Eliyan's valuation milestone and the calibre of its strategic backers make it one to watch as the chiplet economy moves from standards-setting to volume production over the next two to three years.