As AI companies race to build more powerful chips, one problem has become impossible to ignore: getting data in and out of those processors fast enough. Santa Clara-based startup Eliyan believes it has the answer—and investors are betting big on that vision.
On Wednesday, Eliyan announced it has raised $145 million in Series C funding, valuing the company at $1 billion and officially joining the ranks of unicorn startups. The round was led by Seligman Ventures, with participation from new and existing investors, including Cisco Systems, Lumentum, and Umesh Padval, an early investor in networking pioneer Mellanox, whose $6.9 billion acquisition by Nvidia helped reshape the AI networking landscape.
The new funding comes as demand for AI infrastructure surges and chipmakers search for ways to eliminate one of the industry’s biggest performance constraints: moving data between processors quickly enough to keep increasingly powerful AI chips fully utilized.
“AI infrastructure is undergoing one of the largest architectural transitions in computing history,” said Ramin Farjadrad, CEO and Co-Founder of Eliyan. “As compute, memory, packaging, and networking become increasingly interconnected, traditional approaches to system connectivity are reaching their limits. Eliyan was founded to address these challenges at the architectural level. This financing, together with the support of leading strategic and financial investors, positions us to accelerate product development, customer adoption, and ecosystem expansion as we help enable the next generation of AI infrastructure.”
Cisco-backed Eliyan raises $145M at $1B valuation to tackle one of AI’s biggest infrastructure bottlenecks
Today’s AI accelerators can process information at extraordinary speeds, but many spend significant time waiting for data to arrive. As processor performance continues to outpace networking and memory bandwidth, data movement has emerged as one of the biggest obstacles to scaling AI systems efficiently.
“People have tried to build faster compute, faster processors and GPUs,” Eliyan co-founder and CEO Ramin Farjadrad told Reuters. “Today we are at the point that maybe only 30% to 40% of the GPUs are being used, mainly because of how fast they can receive the data to process. We’re solving that problem.”
Eliyan develops high-speed interconnect technology and optical chiplets that help AI processors exchange data more efficiently. The company says its architecture is designed to deliver higher bandwidth while reducing power consumption and packaging complexity, allowing AI infrastructure builders to scale larger computing clusters without relying on proprietary networking ecosystems.
An independent alternative for AI chipmakers
The challenge of connecting thousands of AI chips has become increasingly important as cloud providers and semiconductor companies invest billions in custom AI hardware.
Nvidia addressed much of that challenge through its acquisition of Mellanox, whose networking technology became a cornerstone of the company’s AI infrastructure strategy. Meanwhile, companies such as Google and Amazon Web Services rely on networking technologies from suppliers including Broadcom and Marvell Technology to support their custom AI chips.
Eliyan is positioning itself as an independent alternative. Instead of building AI processors, the company licenses its interconnect technology and provides chiplets that semiconductor companies can integrate directly into their own AI chip designs.
Its technology is aimed at hyperscalers, cloud providers, and semiconductor companies developing custom AI accelerators as demand grows for alternatives to off-the-shelf GPUs.
From startup to unicorn
The funding also marks an important milestone for Eliyan, pushing its valuation to $1 billion less than five years after the company’s founding.
According to the company, initial shipments of its chiplet products are expected to begin this year. Chief Strategy and Business Officer Patrick Soheili said Eliyan expects revenue to grow from low millions of dollars in 2025 to hundreds of millions by the end of 2027 as commercial deployments accelerate.
The company also says its roadmap extends beyond electrical interconnects to electro-optical connectivity, an area attracting growing attention as AI data centers require dramatically higher bandwidth while keeping energy consumption under control.
As part of the financing, Seligman Ventures Managing Partner Umesh Padval, who previously served on Mellanox’s board before its acquisition by Nvidia, will join Eliyan’s board of directors.
Why investors are paying attention
The AI boom has fueled record spending on GPUs, custom AI chips, and data centers. Increasingly, however, the limiting factor is no longer computing power alone but how efficiently those processors communicate with one another.
That shift is creating opportunities for infrastructure companies focused on connectivity rather than compute. By targeting one of AI’s fastest-growing bottlenecks, Eliyan is betting that the next wave of AI innovation will depend as much on moving data efficiently as on building faster processors. Investors appear to agree, backing the startup with $145 million to help bring that vision to market.
