Eliyan raises $145M Series C at $1B for chiplet interconnect

The round was oversubscribed, with Cisco Investments and Lumentum joining existing investors. Seligman managing partner Umesh Padval also takes a seat on Eliyan's board. The money is earmarked for a move from high-speed electrical chiplet links into electro-optical connectivity, plus ecosystem partnerships and manufacturing scale-up. The company says it holds more than 100 patents. The earlier funding was smaller: a $60M Series B in 2024 and a $40M Series A in 2022. Eliyan's product line spans chip-to-chip, die-to-die and rack-to-rack architectures. It is not alone in the space. One analysis counts it as the third chip-interconnect startup to cross a billion-dollar valuation in 2026, alongside Ayar Labs and Celestial AI, which is now owned by Marvell. For AI companies, the relevance is cost and capacity. As models scale across thousands of processors, chip-to-chip links have become the main bottleneck, leaving costly GPUs underused. Teams buying or designing accelerators should expect interconnect to be a differentiator in the next hardware cycle, and should watch whether optical links reach production hardware on a schedule that matches cluster build plans.