Eliyan Valuation 2026: $1B After a $145M Series C in the AI Interconnect Race

Eliyan is now valued at $1 billion after a $145 million Series C closed July 29, 2026 — a unicorn price tag for a five-year-old company that doesn't sell a single chip itself, but licenses the wiring that lets other companies' AI chips talk to each other fast enough to actually use the silicon they've already bought.

Eliyan is a privately held chip-interconnect company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, founded in 2021 by Ramin Farjadrad (CEO, formerly CTO of networking at Marvell), Syrus Ziai, and Patrick Soheili. On July 29, 2026, the company announced an oversubscribed $145 million Series C at a $1 billion post-money valuation, the same week the AI infrastructure market crowned two other interconnect billionaires within months of each other.

Eliyan Valuation: How a Chiplet-Wiring Company Got to $1 Billion

Eliyan's $1 billion valuation was set by a $145 million Series C that closed July 29, 2026, led by Seligman Ventures, whose managing partner Umesh Padval joined Eliyan's board as part of the deal. New investors Cisco Investments and Lumentum joined the round alongside existing backers, and the company's own press release described the round as oversubscribed.

The Series C is the fourth capital event in Eliyan's history: a $40 million Series A in November 2022 backed by Intel, Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix; a $60 million Series B in March 2024 from Samsung Catalyst Fund and Tiger Global; and a $50 million strategic round in January 2026 that brought in AMD, Arm, Coherent, and Meta as direct investors — a customer list disguised as a cap table, since all four are also candidates to license Eliyan's interconnect IP for their own chips. Combined, the four rounds add up to roughly $295 million raised since the company's 2021 founding.

What makes the number notable is timing, not size. Eliyan is the third chip-interconnect startup to cross a multi-billion-dollar valuation event in 2026 alone, following Ayar Labs and Celestial AI — a compressed cluster of billion-dollar outcomes in a category that barely existed as a distinct funding thesis three years ago.

The Problem Eliyan Says It's Solving: Idle GPUs

Eliyan's pitch centers on a specific bottleneck rather than a broad AI narrative. In a Reuters interview covered by HPCwire, Farjadrad said that in some AI clusters today, "maybe only 30% to 40% of the GPUs are being used, mainly because of how fast they can receive the data to process" — meaning expensive accelerator chips sit idle waiting on data to arrive from memory or from other chips in the package, not because compute itself is the constraint.

Eliyan's answer is NuLink, a physical-layer interconnect technology that connects multiple chiplets inside a single package using the industry-standard Bunch of Wires (BoW) and Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) protocols, at bump pitches from 40 to 130 microns. The company licenses this IP and sells chiplet designs to semiconductor companies rather than manufacturing its own chips — a neutral, arms-supplier position that explains why its investor list overlaps so heavily with its likely customer list.

The Series C capital is earmarked specifically for expanding beyond electrical interconnects into electro-optical links, branded NuLink-XD, aimed at rack-to-rack and longer-reach connections where copper wiring runs into physical distance and power limits that optics don't share. That's a shift toward the technology Eliyan's two better-funded rivals bet on from day one.

Eliyan's public technology roadmap lists a silicon-proven 64G die-to-die interconnect already validated in customer test chips today, with 224G and 448G chip-to-chip standards in development and link bandwidths scaling from 1.6 terabits per second toward 12.8 terabits per second as the underlying protocol matures. Both BoW and UCIe are open industry standards rather than Eliyan proprietary formats — UCIe is backed by a consortium that includes Intel, AMD, Arm, Qualcomm, and Samsung, among others — part of the industry's collective move away from single monolithic chips (system-on-chip) toward multiple smaller chiplets wired together inside one package (system-on-package). Eliyan doesn't own that standard; it competes with other companies, including Ayar Labs, to be the physical-layer implementation customers actually license.

Why VCs Are Watching the Interconnect Layer

Eliyan's raise is one data point in a much larger reallocation of chip-focused venture capital toward the physical layer underneath AI models rather than the models themselves. Crunchbase reported roughly $10.7 billion invested into seed-through-pre-IPO semiconductor startups in 2026 through the summer, a pace on track to exceed the prior year, with logic-semiconductor and AI-infrastructure companies pulling in the large majority of that disclosed capital.

For venture investors, the interconnect and packaging category is attractive precisely because it sits underneath every AI chip program rather than betting on any single one winning. A fund that can't get allocation into Nvidia, AMD, or the next foundation-model lab can still get exposure to AI infrastructure spending by backing the companies that sell the wiring, memory access, and packaging technology those chipmakers all need, regardless of which architecture ultimately wins — the same logic that has pulled capital into power and data-center real estate elsewhere in the AI buildout.

Eliyan vs. Ayar Labs vs. Celestial AI: Three Different Outcomes

2026 produced three very different outcomes for the handful of startups trying to fix chip-to-chip data movement for AI. Ayar Labs raised $500 million in a Series E in March 2026 at a $3.75 billion valuation, nearly quadrupling the $1 billion-plus level it hit with a $155 million Series D back in December 2024. Celestial AI didn't stay independent at all: Marvell Technology agreed to acquire it for $3.25 billion upfront, with the total climbing to as much as $5.5 billion if Celestial hits revenue targets by Marvell's fiscal 2029, a deal that closed February 2, 2026.

Figures from Eliyan, Ayar Labs, Marvell/CNBC, Tracxn, and Getlatka, as of August 2026. Celestial AI's revenue was not disclosed at the time of the Marvell acquisition.

Who's Behind Eliyan

Ramin Farjadrad co-founded Eliyan in 2021 after serving as CTO of networking at Marvell Semiconductor, where he worked on high-speed serial interconnects for years before starting the company — meaning Eliyan is now, in effect, competing against businesses that will eventually roll up into the same company where its own CEO used to work, given Marvell's acquisition of rival Celestial AI. Co-founders Syrus Ziai and Patrick Soheili round out a founding team with deep semiconductor and networking pedigrees rather than an AI-research background, reflecting Eliyan's positioning as picks-and-shovels infrastructure rather than a model or applications company.

The investor roster reads like an AI-chip customer directory: AMD, Arm, Meta, Intel Capital, Samsung Catalyst Fund, Micron, SK hynix, Cisco Investments, and Lumentum have all put capital in across Eliyan's four rounds. That pattern — strategic investors who are also potential licensees — is common in the interconnect and packaging layer, where a design win can take years to move from a strategic check to a shipping product.

This is not Eliyan's first pass through the strategic-investor playbook. The January 2026 round, three months before the Series C, existed specifically to lock in AMD, Arm, Coherent, and Meta as named backers ahead of a larger institutional raise — a sequencing choice that let Eliyan walk into Seligman Ventures' due diligence with four of the world's largest chip and hyperscale buyers already on the cap table. For a company selling physical-layer IP rather than a finished product, that sequencing does more to de-risk the sale cycle than a standard product demo would.

How Eliyan Actually Makes Money

Eliyan doesn't manufacture or sell finished chips. Its revenue model is IP licensing and chiplet sales: semiconductor companies pay to license NuLink's physical-layer interconnect technology and integrate Eliyan's chiplet designs into their own AI silicon, creating multi-year design cycles that, once a customer commits, produce sticky, recurring revenue as that chip ships in volume. Eliyan's public guidance points to revenue growing from low single-digit millions of dollars in 2025 to hundreds of millions by the end of 2027, with initial commercial chiplet shipments expected to begin later in 2026 — a claim that should be read as company guidance, not audited results, since Eliyan is privately held and doesn't disclose financial statements.

That revenue curve depends entirely on customers' own chip programs actually shipping in volume, which is the structural risk built into a licensing model: Eliyan doesn't control the timeline of the products its technology ends up inside.

What the headline misses

A $1 billion price tag on a company still guiding to "low millions" of revenue in 2025 is a bet on design wins converting into shipping volume, not a multiple on demonstrated sales — and Eliyan's own numbers put that conversion two full years out. The company also faces competition it can't out-fund: Nvidia already controls NVLink, the dominant chip-to-chip interconnect built directly into its own GPU architectures, and Nvidia's earlier acquisition of Mellanox gives it InfiniBand for cluster-level networking too. A hyperscaler or chipmaker that standardizes on Nvidia's stack has less reason to license a third-party interconnect at all, no matter how much faster Eliyan's technology tests in a lab.

Eliyan is also entering the optical-interconnect market from behind. Ayar Labs and Celestial AI built optical technology as their founding bet and have years of customer engagements and, in Ayar Labs' case, disclosed revenue to show for it; Eliyan's NuLink-XD optical line is a newer extension of an electrical-interconnect business, funded specifically by this Series C. One read on this: Eliyan's lower valuation relative to its two peers isn't a mispricing — it's the market correctly discounting a later, less-proven entry into the harder technical category, even as its core electrical business remains genuinely differentiated.

There's also a structural question the $1 billion price doesn't answer: what happens to independent interconnect startups once the category matures. Celestial AI didn't get to stay independent and prove out a standalone revenue model — it got absorbed into a larger semiconductor company before the market could fully price it on its own merits. If Eliyan's technology proves out, an acquisition by one of its own strategic investors, rather than an IPO, is at least as plausible an outcome, which would cap upside for later-stage investors coming in at or above the current $1 billion mark.

Bottom Line

Bottom line: Eliyan's $1 billion valuation is real venture pricing from an oversubscribed round backed by the same chipmakers it hopes to license technology to, set against a genuine and well-documented problem — AI GPUs sitting idle at 30-40% utilization because data can't reach them fast enough. But it's a valuation on a licensing pipeline, not on shipped revenue, in a category where Nvidia's vertically integrated NVLink is the default choice and where Eliyan's better-funded peers, Ayar Labs and the now Marvell-owned Celestial AI, got to optical interconnects years earlier.