Eliyan Reaches $1bn Valuation with $145m Series C Funding
For three years, the AI race has been a quest for faster chips. Now, Eliyan has become a $1bn company by highlighting a unique challenge: chips are advancing so rapidly that their current interconnects are becoming a bottleneck.
Eliyan, a Santa Clara-based startup, has closed an oversubscribed $145m Series C round at a $1bn valuation, making it a unicorn. Seligman Ventures led the investment, with strategic partners Cisco Investments and Lumentum also on board.
"Today we are at the point that we are maybe 30-40% of the GPUs is being used, and is being mainly limited by how fast they can receive the data to process," shared Eliyan’s CEO, Ramin Farjadrad, with Reuters. “We’re solving that problem.”
Eliyan’s innovative approach lies in creating high-speed, low-power connections, enabling data centers’ expensive silicon to operate at maximum capacity. They offer a neutral, independent solution for AI chip interconnects, licensing their technology and selling chiplets to various manufacturers.
From Electrical to Optical Interconnects
The startup initially focused on electrical links between dies using standard packaging. Now, Eliyan is expanding into optical interconnects, which are becoming increasingly crucial for data movement between racks in hyperscaler facilities, offering a power-efficient alternative.
Farjadrad described the funding round as a bet on the future of AI infrastructure: "AI infrastructure is undergoing one of the largest architectural transitions in computing history… Eliyan was founded to address these challenges at the architectural level."
The funds will be allocated for development, ecosystem partnerships, and manufacturing, with Eliyan projecting hundreds of millions in sales by 2027.