Pomegra
Eliyan closed a $145M Series C at a $1B valuation, with Cisco and Lumentum joining as new strategic backers for its AI optical interconnect platform.
Key Takeaways
- Seligman Ventures led the round; Cisco Investments and Lumentum entered as first-time strategic investors on July 29, 2026.
- Eliyan reached unicorn status six months after a $50M strategic round from AMD, Arm, Coherent, and Meta.
- Proceeds fund NuLink-XD commercialization and a push into rack-to-rack optical links for large-scale AI clusters.
Lead
Santa Clara's Eliyan Corporation raised $145 million in a Series C on July 29, 2026, lifting its valuation to $1 billion. Seligman Ventures led the financing, with Cisco Investments and Lumentum entering as new strategic investors alongside existing backers. The capital extends Eliyan's chiplet interconnect business into electro-optical links - the class of hardware increasingly required to move data between racks in hyperscale AI data centers without burning power at the same rate data demand grows.
What Does Eliyan Actually Make?
Eliyan builds the physical-layer silicon that connects chips across increasingly large distances inside AI infrastructure. Its core product line, NuLink PHYs and NuGear chiplets, covers die-to-die, chip-to-chip, and chip-to-module connectivity and is backward compatible with the Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) standard. In July 2026, alongside the funding announcement, the company introduced NuLink-XD, a 224G PAM4 SerDes fabricated on TSMC's 3nm node, designed to cut power for electro-optical modules by up to 40% compared with conventional approaches.
The optical extension is a meaningful shift in scope. Eliyan began with the premise that AI chiplet clusters needed better electrical die-to-die links within a package. NuLink-XD bets that the next hard problem is between racks, where copper hits its physical limits and light-based links take over. The two problems are related but the engineering and competitive landscape diverge considerably at that boundary.
Why Did Cisco and Lumentum Write Checks?
Both investors have direct commercial stakes in how AI data center interconnects evolve. Cisco sells networking equipment that sits between racks; if Eliyan's technology reduces the bandwidth bottleneck at the optical module interface, Cisco's own switch and transceiver roadmap benefits from a denser, lower-power front end. Lumentum is one of the largest suppliers of optical components to hyperscalers, making it a potential manufacturing partner as much as a financial backer.
Strategic investors writing eight-figure checks typically want a supplier relationship, a window into a roadmap, or both. Here, the investor composition reads more like supply-chain alignment than a pure financial bet - each new name on the cap table has a reason to want NuLink-XD to succeed that extends well beyond share price appreciation.
What Does the $1B Valuation Say About the January Round?
Eliyan's January 2026 strategic financing - $50 million from AMD, Arm, Coherent, and Meta, alongside Samsung Catalyst Fund and Intel Capital - carried no disclosed valuation. The $1 billion figure set six months later means the company crossed the unicorn threshold quickly, by investor assessment. That acceleration reflects less on disclosed revenue - Eliyan has not published any - and more on how urgently AI infrastructure builders want alternatives to current rack-level interconnect constraints.
Whether the valuation holds through commercialization depends on design wins. Lead customers are integrating NuLink-XD into next-generation systems, but the gap between tape-out and production volume is where semiconductor startups historically face the hardest pressure.
Founding and Team
Eliyan was founded in 2021 by Ramin Farjadrad, Syrus Ziai, and Patrick Soheili. Farjadrad, the CEO, previously served as CTO of Marvell's networking division and invented the Bunch of Wires (BoW) protocol adopted by the Open Compute Project. Ziai held a senior engineering role at Qualcomm. Umesh Padval of Seligman Ventures joins the board as part of the Series C terms.
The founding team's background in networking silicon shapes the company's framing: interconnect is the primary constraint on AI cluster scaling, not a secondary concern to be addressed after compute is optimized.
Outlook
Eliyan enters late 2026 as a unicorn with a product on TSMC's 3nm node, a cap table spanning compute, networking, and optical components, and a specific technical bet that optical interconnects will migrate from the data center spine into the rack-level fabric of AI clusters. Established photonics suppliers and several well-funded startups are targeting the same transition. Customer tapeouts over the next 12 to 18 months will determine whether the $1 billion valuation proves conservative or premature.
