Eliyan hits $1B valuation with $145M for AI interconnects

Every quarter of the AI capex cycle keeps making the same quiet point: the accelerators themselves are usually not the constraint. Wiring them together is. That is the pitch behind Eliyan's newly closed $145 million Series C, which SiliconANGLE reports has minted the Santa Clara chiplet interconnect startup as a unicorn at a $1 billion valuation, with Seligman Ventures leading and Cisco Ventures and Lumentum also backing the round.

The framing from CEO and co-founder Ramin Farjadrad, via Yahoo Finance, is the number operators should sit with: today's GPU utilization hovers around 30 to 40 percent, not because compute has run out but because data transfer between chips cannot keep up. Eliyan sells NuLink PHYs and NuGear chiplets aimed at die-to-die, chip-to-chip, and rack-to-rack connectivity, targeting the I/O, memory, and power 'walls' that show up when a cluster is scaled into serious training capacity.

Chief strategy and business officer Patrick Soheili told Yahoo the company expects initial chiplet shipments this year and forecasts hundreds of millions of dollars in sales by the end of 2027, up from 'low millions' of dollars in 2025. Umesh Padval, the Seligman managing partner who sat on Mellanox's board through its sale to Nvidia, is joining Eliyan's board, a resume that says something about how this deal is being underwritten. GamesBeat notes the team spun out of Marvell after their previous startup Aquantia was acquired, and that total capital raised is now close to $250 million.

The honest caveat is that the customer story is still opaque. The reporting says the technology is being evaluated, and in some cases deployed, by hyperscalers, AI accelerators, and memory chip suppliers, but names none of them. Eliyan is also stepping into a lane where Nvidia's NVLink, AMD's Pensando, and Broadcom already sit, so the 'hundreds of millions' figure is a claim about design wins that have not yet been announced publicly, not a backlog. What is worth watching is whether the first named customer turns out to be a hyperscaler building around a non-Nvidia accelerator stack, because that is the wedge that would justify the valuation.