Eliyan Draws Takeover Bid, Early Arm Talks at $3B Target

Five-year-old chip-interconnect startup Eliyan has received a takeover bid and is working with an investment bank to target a $3 billion valuation, The Information reported. That is roughly triple the $1 billion mark set when it closed a $145 million Series C in July.

SoftBank-owned Arm, an existing investor, 'held early talks about buying Eliyan but made no bid and would be unlikely to at that valuation,' according to the report. Both Eliyan and Arm declined to comment, and the current bidder has not been named.

Founded in 2021, Eliyan has raised more than $250 million from AMD, Cisco and Meta plus venture firms including Seligman Ventures and Tiger Global. The company licenses NuLink PHY and NuGear chiplet IP for die-to-die, chip-to-chip and rack-to-rack links between chiplets and high-bandwidth memory.

The talks surface in a week when Nvidia disclosed an investment in inference rival d-Matrix via NVLink Fusion, another sign that incumbents are absorbing the interconnect and inference layers rather than letting independents scale through them.