❯ Chip Interconnect Company Eliyan Closes $145M Series C, Valuation Reaches $1B

INVESTORSAccording to a July 29 announcement, chip interconnect company Eliyan closed a $145 million Series C at a valuation of $1 billion, officially attaining unicorn status. Seligman Ventures led the round, with Cisco’s investment arm and optical communications maker Lumentum entering as new strategic investors. The company is based in Santa Clara, California, was founded in 2021, and has cumulative funding of approximately $295 million. This round will fund expansion from its existing electrical chiplet interconnect business into electro-optical interconnect for AI systems.

INVESTOR SHIFTTimeline: 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 — the strategic round’s investors were AMD, Arm, Coherent, and Meta. Six months ago, the incoming investors were chip designers and hyperscalers; this round, they are Cisco and Lumentum — network equipment and optical module vendors. This reshuffling of the investor roster speaks louder than the amounts themselves: Eliyan’s business boundary is expanding from “how two dies inside a package communicate” to “how racks communicate with each other.” When upstream and downstream players in the industry chain take turns investing, it usually means the technology has entered their roadmaps.

EDGEFounded by Ramin Farjadrad, Patrick Soheili, and Syrus Ziai, Eliyan’s business model is licensing technology to chip manufacturers rather than making chips itself — which lets it be accepted by both AMD and Meta without creating competitive conflict. The key technical difference: NuLink uses standard packaging to deliver high-speed die-to-die, chip-to-chip, and even rack-to-rack communication, without relying on expensive advanced packaging processes. With advanced packaging capacity under long-term strain, this directly determines customers’ production viability. The bottleneck of AI clusters has shifted from single-card compute to data movement between chips — and that is exactly where Eliyan sits.

DATA MOVEMENTAmong the eight deals in this issue, this round ranks second smallest in size, yet its signal is substantial: investors are starting to pay for the space between compute rather than compute itself. Interconnect, optical modules, and memory expansion — once treated as supporting components — are turning from cost items into bottleneck items, and valuation logic is being rewritten accordingly. The next capital to chase in will most likely move along this chain toward optics — Cisco and Lumentum appearing simultaneously on the shareholder roster has already marked the direction.

▪ SIGNALAI’s bottleneck has moved from inside the chip to between chips, and capital’s attention has followed.