Cisco-backed Silicon Valley startup Eliyan raises $145M at $1B valuation to build the future of AI interconnects — TFN

• Santa Clara-based Eliyan has raised $145 million in an oversubscribed Series C, reaching a $1 billion valuation, led by Seligman Ventures with new strategic investors Cisco Investments and Lumentum.

• Founded by repeat entrepreneurs Ramin Farjadrad, Patrick Soheili, and Syrus Akbari, Eliyan is building the high-speed interconnect technology that powers the next generation of AI infrastructure.

• The funding will accelerate the company’s expansion into electro-optical interconnects, one of the fastest-growing areas of AI computing.

Santa Clara-based chip interconnect startup Eliyan has raised $145 million in an oversubscribed Series C, valuing the company at $1 billion. Seligman Ventures led the round, joined by two new strategic backers: Cisco Investments and Lumentum.

Solving AI’s hidden bottleneck

It is a strange thing to admit for an industry obsessed with faster chips: the chips are no longer the problem. It is what connects them. As AI models spread across hundreds or thousands of processors, the wiring between them has become the bottleneck, leaving expensive GPUs idle while they wait for data. 

Founded in 2021 by Ramin Farjadrad, Patrick Soheili and Syrus Ziai, Eliyan works by licensing its NuLink PHY and NuGear chiplet technologies to chipmakers, enabling high-speed die-to-die, chip-to-chip and rack-to-rack communication using standard packaging rather than the costlier advanced packaging methods rivals rely on. 

Soheili, the company’s chief strategy and business officer, said Eliyan expects chiplet shipments to begin this year and forecasts revenue to grow from the low millions of dollars in 2025 to hundreds of millions by the end of 2027.

“AI infrastructure is undergoing one of the largest architectural transitions in computing history. Traditional approaches to system connectivity are reaching their limits. This financing will help us accelerate product development, customer adoption and ecosystem expansion,” adds Farjadrad, CEO and co-founder of Eliyan. 

A crowded, consolidating field

Eliyan is chasing a problem that has become one of the busiest corners of AI infrastructure investing, and the competitive landscape shifted dramatically eight months ago. 

Celestial AI, which had raised over $500 million for its photonic interconnect platform, agreed in December 2025 to be acquired by Marvell for $2.35 billion.Lightmatter has raised over $850 million for its own optical computing platform, and Etched, attacking the adjacent inference-hardware bottleneck rather than interconnects specifically.  just hit a $10.3 billion valuation, underscoring how much capital is chasing every layer of the AI hardware stack right now. 

Closer to Eliyan’s own niche, ChipAgents recently expanded its Series A to $134 million, backed by Micron and MediaTek, applying AI to chip design rather than connectivity. 

Eliyan’s pitch is that it can hit comparable bandwidth using cheaper, standard electrical packaging, an approach it is now extending into electro-optical interconnects as part of this round.

What the funding signals

The round brings Eliyan’s total funding to roughly $295 million, following a $40 million Series A in November 2022, a $60 million Series B in March 2024, and a $50 million strategic round in January 2026 that included AMD, Arm, Coherent and Meta as investors. 

Umesh Padval, managing partner at Seligman Ventures, is joining Eliyan’s board as part of the deal. 

“As AI systems continue to scale, efficient electrical and optical interconnects are becoming performance-defining technologies for modern AI data centres. Eliyan combines deep semiconductor expertise with a differentiated architecture built for next-generation AI systems,” Padval says. 

Farjadrad concludes, “AI infrastructure is undergoing one of the largest architectural transitions in computing history. Traditional approaches to system connectivity are reaching their limits.”

Whether Eliyan ends up scaling independently or becomes the next acquisition target in a consolidating interconnect market, following Celestial AI’s path into Marvell may be the more interesting question than the valuation itself.