Cisco-Backed Eliyan Turns Unicorn With $145M Round To Fix AI's Data Traffic Jam

Eliyan Corporation has closed a 145 million dollar Series C round that pushes its valuation to 1 billion dollars, making the Santa Clara based chip interconnect startup one of the newest unicorns in the AI infrastructure race.

The round was led by Seligman Ventures, with two new strategic investors joining the cap table for the first time: Cisco Investments and optical components supplier Lumentum. Existing backers also participated in what the company described as an oversubscribed raise. As part of the deal, Seligman managing partner Umesh Padval, who previously sat on the board of networking pioneer Mellanox during its sale to Nvidia, will join Eliyan's board of directors.

The company solves a problem that has quietly become one of the most expensive bottlenecks in artificial intelligence infrastructure. As data centers pack ever larger clusters of AI accelerators together to train and run increasingly complex models, the chips inside those clusters often sit idle simply because data cannot move between them fast enough. Processing power has scaled dramatically in recent years, but the connections ferrying data between chips have not kept pace, leaving expensive hardware underutilized even during peak workloads.

Eliyan chief executive and co founder Ramin Farjadrad has been vocal about this gap for years, arguing that the industry has focused heavily on building faster processors while neglecting the plumbing that moves data between them. With this round, that argument appears to be gaining traction among some of the biggest names in networking and semiconductors.

Eliyan's existing technology, marketed under its NuLink and NuGear product families, focuses on electrical chiplet interconnects designed to address bandwidth, power, and input output constraints inside AI scale up and scale in networks. The new capital will fund an expansion into electro optical interconnects, extending the company's reach from intra package electrical connections to system level optical fabrics capable of supporting larger and more power efficient AI compute clusters.

That shift places Eliyan in more direct competition with optical interconnect specialists such as Ayar Labs, which raised a 500 million dollar Series E at a 3.75 billion dollar valuation earlier this year to scale its own optical technology for AI infrastructure. Eliyan is approaching the same market from a different angle, building on physical layer intellectual property already embedded in customer silicon and treating optics as a natural extension rather than its founding focus.

The company's backer list reflects how central interconnect technology has become to the broader AI hardware ecosystem. In January 2026, Eliyan disclosed 50 million dollars in strategic investment from chipmakers AMD and Arm, optical components firm Coherent, and Meta, alongside continued participation from Samsung Catalyst Fund and Intel Capital. Lumentum's involvement in this latest round makes it the second major optical components supplier to back the company, following Coherent's earlier investment.

Eliyan's chief strategy and business officer Patrick Soheili said the company expects to begin initial chiplet shipments later this year and is forecasting hundreds of millions of dollars in sales by the end of 2027, a significant jump from what he described as low single digit millions in revenue during 2025. That timeline suggests Eliyan is moving from a research heavy phase into commercial deployment just as demand for interconnect solutions accelerates across the industry.

The funding also lands amid a broader wave of interest in solving AI's data movement problem. Companies developing custom AI accelerators to compete with Nvidia and AMD's graphics processing units face the same fundamental limitation regardless of who designs the chip: raw compute power is increasingly outpacing the ability to feed that compute with data quickly enough. Eliyan's pitch is that its interconnect layer, rather than faster processors alone, is what unlocks the next leap in usable AI performance.

With fresh capital, a growing bench of strategic investors from across the semiconductor and networking world, and an expansion plan that spans both electrical and optical interconnects, Eliyan is positioning itself as critical infrastructure for the next generation of AI data centers rather than a niche components supplier. Whether that ambition holds up will depend on how quickly its optical roadmap matures and whether hyperscalers adopt its technology at the scale the company is now targeting.