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

Eliyan Corporation closed a $145 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation, led by Seligman Ventures and joined by Cisco Investments and Lumentum, to expand from electrical chiplet interconnects into electro-optical links for AI systems. The Santa Clara company announced the financing on July 29, 2026, and said the capital will fund development of optical interconnects to address bandwidth bottlenecks in AI scale-up fabrics.

Funding https://www.unite.ai/series/funding/ Eliyan Raises $145M Series C to Move Into Optical Interconnects Add Unite.AI to your preferred sources on Google https://www.google.com/preferences/source?q=unite.ai Eliyan Corporation says it has closed a $145 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation https://eliyan.com/news/eliyan-achieves-unicorn-status-with-145-million-series-c/ , with the round led by Seligman Ventures https://www.seligman.com/ and joined by two new strategic investors drawn from optical networking: Cisco Investments https://www.ciscoinvestments.com/ and Lumentum https://www.lumentum.com/en . 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 https://eliyan.com/products 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 buys The round follows a product launch that sets up the optical push. On July 24, 2026, Eliyan introduced NuLink-XD https://eliyan.com/press-release/eliyan-introduces-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 customers Both 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 https://eliyan.com/press-release/eliyan-secures-50-million-in-strategic-investments/ in January 2026 from AMD, Arm, Coherent and Meta, with existing backers Samsung Catalyst Fund and Intel INTC https://www.securities.io/nasdaq/INTC/ Capital participating. Lumentum is the second optical components supplier on the register, after Coherent came in during that round. Its $60 million Series B https://eliyan.com/press-release/eliyan-closes-60-million-series-b-funding-round/ in March 2024 was co-led by Samsung Catalyst Fund and Tiger Global Management. Padval cited a roster of 12 strategic investors, a patent portfolio the company puts above 100, and existing customer engagements as the basis for leading the round. The lead investor’s semiconductor book Seligman Ventures is itself a recent arrival, launched in February 2026 with $500 million as the venture arm of Seligman Investments, the $30 billion technology and healthcare investment business led by Paul Wick. It invests across AI and cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity and data-center hardware. Padval ran C-Cube Microsystems as chief executive before 18 years of venture investing, and has sat on the boards of Mellanox, IDT and Monolithic Power Systems MPWR https://www.securities.io/nasdaq/MPWR/ . He laid out the firm’s infrastructure thesis in an interview with Unite.AI https://www.unite.ai/umesh-padval-managing-partner-seligman-ventures-interview-series/ , and holds a board seat at Cognichip, which raised $60 million to rebuild chip design around AI https://www.unite.ai/cognichip-raises-60m-series-a-to-rebuild-chip-design-around-ai/ . “Efficient electrical and optical interconnects that enable future scale-up and scale-out networks between compute and memory are becoming the performance-defining technologies of modern AI data centers,” Padval said. Investors have been pricing that view aggressively. Ayar Labs raised a $500 million Series E at a $3.75 billion valuation https://www.unite.ai/ayar-labs-raises-500-million-series-e-at-3-75-billion-valuation-to-scale-optical-interconnects-for-ai-infrastructure/ in March 2026 to scale optical interconnects for AI infrastructure, and Intel demonstrated an optical compute interconnect chiplet https://www.unite.ai/intel-unveils-groundbreaking-optical-compute-interconnect-chiplet-revolutionizing-ai-data-transmission/ in 2024. Eliyan reaches that market from the electrical side, with physical-layer IP already in customer silicon and optics as the extension rather than the founding bet. Eliyan says the proceeds go to next-generation interconnect development, ecosystem partnerships and scaling manufacturing, and that it is working with lead customers on designing NuLink-XD into their next system generation.