# Eliyan Series C

> Eliyan has raised a $145 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation, crossing into unicorn territory, in a round led by Seligman Ventures with Cisco Investments and Lumentum joining. That brings total funding to about $295 million for a company founded in 2021 by Ramin Farjadrad, Patrick Soheili, and Syrus Ziai. Eliyan works on a deeply unglamorous but increasingly critical problem: moving data efficiently between the compute, memory, and networking layers of an AI system. Its electro-optical interconnect operates at rack and cluster scale, aiming at the bottleneck that appears once you wire thousands of chips together and the links between them, not the chips themselves, become the limit. The backer list signals how strategic this has become. Prior investors include AMD, Arm, Coherent, and Meta, which took a strategic stake in January 2026, the kind of names that fund interconnect because their own AI buildouts depend on it. With the money earmarked for manufacturing capacity, Eliyan is betting that the next phase of the AI boom is won or lost in the plumbing between the chips.

_Section: [AI Funding Tracker](https://www.wortins.com/funding) · Source: Data Center Dynamics · Published Tuesday, August 11, 2026_

## Wortins' read

Eliyan has raised a $145 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation, crossing into unicorn territory, in a round led by Seligman Ventures with Cisco Investments and Lumentum joining. That brings total funding to about $295 million for a company founded in 2021 by Ramin Farjadrad, Patrick Soheili, and Syrus Ziai. Eliyan works on a deeply unglamorous but increasingly critical problem: moving data efficiently between the compute, memory, and networking layers of an AI system. Its electro-optical interconnect operates at rack and cluster scale, aiming at the bottleneck that appears once you wire thousands of chips together and the links between them, not the chips themselves, become the limit. The backer list signals how strategic this has become. Prior investors include AMD, Arm, Coherent, and Meta, which took a strategic stake in January 2026, the kind of names that fund interconnect because their own AI buildouts depend on it. With the money earmarked for manufacturing capacity, Eliyan is betting that the next phase of the AI boom is won or lost in the plumbing between the chips.

## Source

[Read the full story at Data Center Dynamics](https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/chiplet-interconnect-startup-eliyan-valued-at-1bn-following-145m-series-c-funding-round)

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