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Chips · Aug 01, 2026, 11:07 AM · 4 sources

Eliyan hits unicorn status; $145M Series C for electro-optical interconnects solving AI data center bottleneck

<cite index="62-2">Eliyan Corporation has completed its Series C with a total of $145 million at a $1 billion valuation. The oversubscribed round was led by Seligman Ventures, with participation from additional new and existing investors, including two new strategic investors: Cisco Investments and Lumentum</cite>. <cite index="62-2">As part of the financing, veteran technology investor and operator Umesh Padval, Managing Partner of Seligman Ventures, will join Eliyan's Board of Directors</cite>.

<cite index="62-3">Eliyan's Die-to-Die, Chip-to-Chip, and Rack-to-Rack chiplet interconnect technologies are designed to address the increasingly complex connectivity demands of next-generation AI systems spanning advanced package-level integration, multi-package scale-up architectures, memory expansion, and emerging high-bandwidth infrastructure fabrics</cite>. <cite index="66-2">Its chiplet technology solves the AI data center bottleneck that leaves GPU utilization stuck at 30 to 40%</cite>.

<cite index="64-2">Demand for AI infrastructure surges and chipmakers search for ways to eliminate one of the industry's biggest performance constraints: moving data between processors quickly enough to keep increasingly powerful AI chips fully utilized</cite>. <cite index="67-4">Eliyan's NuLink PHYs and NuGear chiplets provide die-to-die, chip-to-chip and rack-to-rack connectivity that can drastically improve both the bandwidth capacity and power efficiency of AI clusters</cite>. <cite index="66-3">Eliyan expects revenue to grow from low millions in 2025 to hundreds of millions of dollars by end of 2027, with initial chiplet product shipments beginning in 2026</cite>.

For data-center architects and AI infrastructure planners: Eliyan addresses a critical constraint that has been largely invisible but is now limiting GPU utilization at scale—data movement between processors. Unlike NVIDIA's proprietary InfiniBand and NVLink ecosystems, <cite index="66-4">Eliyan positions itself as a vendor-agnostic independent alternative that semiconductor companies can integrate into their own chip designs</cite>. With Cisco, Lumentum, and a portfolio of 100+ patents, plus explicit commercial timelines (shipments beginning 2026, revenue guidance to hundreds of millions by end-2027), Eliyan signals that electro-optical interconnect is graduating from lab research to critical infrastructure in AI clusters.

Sources

Everything this brief rests on
  1. 01 Primary source eliyan.com
  2. 02 eliyan.com eliyan.com “Eliyan Corporation has completed its Series C with a total of $145 million at a $1 billion valuation”
  3. 03 globenewswire.com globenewswire.com “The oversubscribed round was led by Seligman Ventures, with participation from additional new and existing investors, including two new strategic investors: Cisco Investments and Lumentum”
  4. 04 techstartups.com techstartups.com “AI infrastructure is undergoing one of the largest architectural transitions in computing history”