Optical interconnect startup Eliyan raises $145M in funding to solve the AI chip cluster connectivity crunch

Optical interconnect startup Eliyan Corp. announced today it closed a $145 million Series C funding round that values the company at $1 billion. Seligman Ventures led the round with participation from Cisco Ventures and Lumentum. The Silicon Valley-based company said the financing validates its technology for addressing bandwidth bottlenecks in large AI accelerator clusters. Eliyan has developed electro-optical interconnects including NuLink PHYs and NuGear chiplets designed to provide die-to-die, chip-to-chip and rack-to-rack connectivity. Co-founder and Chief Executive Ramin Farjadrad said AI is driving a significant architectural transition in the data center industry. "As compute, memory, packaging and networking become increasingly interconnected, traditional approaches to system connectivity are reaching their limits," he said. The company will use the funds for research and development, manufacturing scale-up and partner ecosystem growth. Seligman Ventures managing partner Umesh Padval praised Eliyan's technical depth and portfolio of more than 100 patents. He said optical interconnects are becoming a performance-defining technology in AI data centers. Farjadrad said the technology is being evaluated and deployed by some hyperscalers, AI accelerator and memory chip suppliers, though he did not name them.