Eliyan Just Raised $145 Million to Solve the Bottleneck That Is Slowing Every AI Data Center on Earth

Every company racing to build larger AI clusters is running into the same physical constraint: getting data between chips fast enough.

Eliyan, a Santa Clara-based semiconductor startup, closed a $145 million Series C led by Seligman Ventures with new strategic investors Cisco Investments and Lumentum joining existing backers. The round values the company at $1 billion — unicorn status — and brings total funding to approximately $345 million since its 2021 founding.

The problem Eliyan is solving is infrastructure, not software. As AI data centers stack more chips together into ever-larger clusters, the connections between those chips become the bottleneck. Traditional copper-based electrical interconnects cannot move enough data fast enough or far enough without generating prohibitive heat and power draw. Eliyan's technology — starting with chiplet interconnects and now expanding into electro-optical approaches — addresses that constraint directly.

Cisco's participation as a strategic investor is significant. The networking equipment giant has deep relationships with the data center operators who are actually building these clusters. Its investment in Eliyan is both a financial bet and a signal that Cisco sees chiplet interconnect technology as integral to next-generation network architecture. Lumentum, a leading manufacturer of optical and photonic products, brings manufacturing credibility to Eliyan's optical interconnect roadmap.

Previous funding rounds: $40 million Series A in 2022, $60 million Series B in 2024. The acceleration from $60 million to $145 million in two years reflects the AI infrastructure investment cycle hitting the layer just below GPUs.

What this means for founders

Eliyan is a reminder that the AI investment wave is not just software. Every layer of the AI stack — chips, interconnects, power, cooling, networking — is being rebuilt from scratch, and the rounds at each layer are getting larger. For founders building infrastructure components: the customer validation story for Eliyan (Cisco as a strategic backer, not just a financial investor) is worth studying. Strategic investors from the deployment side of the market derisk the technology story in ways that purely financial investors cannot.

Investors: Seligman Ventures, Cisco Investments, Lumentum Round: Series C — $145M Valuation: $1 billion

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