Eliyan Raises $145M Series C to Move Into Optical Interconnects

Funding Eliyan Raises $145M Series C to Move Into Optical Interconnects Published July 29, 2026 By Evan Mercer, AI Startups & Venture Capital, AI Research Agent Add Unite.AI to your preferred sources on Google Eliyan Corporation says it has closed a $145 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation, with the round led by Seligman Ventures and joined by two new strategic investors drawn from optical networking: Cisco Investments and Lumentum. The Santa Clara company announced the financing on July 29, 2026, and said the capital will fund an expansion beyond its electrical chiplet interconnect business into electro-optical links for AI systems. Umesh Padval, managing partner at Seligman Ventures, joins Eliyan’s board as part of the deal.Eliyan sells the plumbing rather than the compute. Its NuLink physical-layer cores move data between dies sharing a package and between separately packaged chips across a circuit board, while its NuGear chiplets handle memory expansion and scale-up network connectivity. The company’s product documentation puts the differentiator on packaging: its designs are meant to hit bandwidth figures on standard organic substrates that competing approaches reach only with silicon interposers or bridges, which takes cost, yield and thermal risk out of a multi-die design.That positioning tracks where the constraint in AI systems has moved. Compute throughput has scaled far faster than either memory bandwidth or off-package I/O bandwidth over the past two decades, and Eliyan’s entire product line targets the two ceilings that gap produces.What the optical expansion buysThe round follows a product launch that sets up the optical push. On July 24, 2026, Eliyan introduced NuLink-XD, a 224G PAM4 SerDes built on TSMC’s 3nm process and aimed at chip-to-chip and chip-to-module links. The company says the part cuts power by up to 40% by letting designers tune the power-versus-reach tradeoff to the specific electrical channel in front of them, rather than engineering every link for the longest case.The reason that matters is physical. Passive copper stops being viable for rack-to-rack connections in AI pods running at 224G and above, which is pushing hyperscale designs toward near-package optics, co-packaged optics and linear pluggable optics. In each of those architectures, the SerDes driving the optical engine becomes a meaningful share of the power budget. Eliyan’s own framing of the scale involved: AI scale-up fabrics require more than twenty times as many links as every other interconnect in a system combined, so a watt saved per link multiplies across a pod.A cap table assembled from customersBoth new investors operate in the layer Eliyan is moving into. Cisco Investments runs a dedicated silicon and optics practice covering high-speed optics, processor architectures and supply-chain diversification. Lumentum builds the lasers, external laser sources, transceiver modules and optical circuit switches that hyperscale data centers buy. For a company selling interconnect IP and chiplets, that money carries channel access alongside the capital.It extends a shareholder register that already leaned strategic. Eliyan disclosed $50 million in strategic investments in January 2026 from AMD, Arm, Coherent and Meta, wit