Optical interconnect startup Eliyan raises $145M in funding to solve the AI chip cluster connectivity crunch
Silicon Valley-based chip interconnect startup Eliyan Corp.’s valuation has increased to $1 billion after it closed on a $145 million Series C funding round today.
Seligman Ventures led the round, with Cisco Ventures and Lumentum also backing the newly minted unicorn.
Eliyan says the round validates that its technology is poised to address a growing problem in the artificial intelligence industry. Namely, it’s targeting the bottleneck that occurs in data centers as companies build ever-larger clusters of AI accelerators to power more sophisticated large language models and “agentic” applications.
As data center operators scale up their chip clusters to try and support these increasingly powerful workloads, they’re facing some tricky problems when it comes to managing their power demands and bandwidth requirements. Simply put, existing chip interconnects and power systems lack the bandwidth needed to feed these enormous clusters with enough data and energy to keep them running.
