Cisco-Backed Eliyan Raises $145M, Achieves $1B Valuation to Solve AI Interconnect Bottlenecks with Electro-Optical Solutions

August 2, 2026

Tech Funding News UK

Overview

Silicon Valley startup Eliyan has raised $145 million, including strategic investments from Cisco and Lumentum, pushing its valuation to $1 billion. This funding will accelerate its expansion into electro-optical interconnect technology, addressing inter-chip and inter-rack communication bottlenecks in AI infrastructure. Eliyan claims to achieve comparable bandwidth using standard packaging, positioning it to significantly contribute to high-efficiency, high-bandwidth communication in the AI era.

In Depth

Key Findings

Eliyan, a Silicon Valley startup, has successfully raised $145 million in Series B funding, including strategic investments from major players like Cisco and Lumentum, catapulting its valuation to $1 billion. This substantial capital injection is aimed at accelerating the expansion of its electro-optical interconnect technology to resolve the escalating bottlenecks in inter-chip and inter-rack communication within AI infrastructure.

Eliyan’s Technology and Market Impact

Electro-Optical Interconnect Technology: Eliyan is developing innovative interconnect technology that combines electrical and optical signals. This approach overcomes the limitations of traditional electrical wiring—speed, power consumption, and signal loss—for short to medium-range data transmission between chips and racks. The company claims to achieve bandwidth comparable to optical interconnects while utilizing standard packaging, offering significant advantages in terms of cost-efficiency and ease of deployment.
Addressing AI Infrastructure Bottlenecks: Training and inference of large-scale AI models require thousands of GPUs to operate in parallel, exchanging vast amounts of data at high speeds. Conventional copper-based connections have made this communication a bottleneck, limiting the overall performance of AI clusters. Eliyan’s technology is expected to alleviate this bottleneck, dramatically enhancing the scalability and efficiency of AI infrastructure.
Strong Investor Support: Strategic investments from industry leaders like Cisco and Lumentum reflect strong market confidence in Eliyan’s technology as essential for AI-era data center infrastructure. Achieving a $1 billion valuation solidifies its unicorn status and indicates high future growth potential.

Background and Industry Context

The rise of generative AI, large language models (LLMs), and high-performance computing (HPC) is revolutionizing data center design and operation. Specifically, the data transfer speed between semiconductor chips like CPUs and GPUs has become a critical factor in determining overall system performance. Traditional electrical signal transmission faces issues of heat generation and signal degradation when operating at high frequencies, making a transition to optical connectivity inevitable. Eliyan’s electro-optical interconnect technology offers a promising solution during this transition, delivering performance improvements while maintaining compatibility with existing infrastructure.

Strategic Significance and Outlook

This substantial funding round positions Eliyan to establish leadership in the electro-optical interconnect market and play a crucial role in shaping the future of AI infrastructure. The company’s technology is expected to contribute to enhancing AI chip performance, reducing data center power consumption, and improving cost efficiency, thereby accelerating innovation across all AI-driven fields, including autonomous driving, healthcare, finance, and scientific research. For investors, opportunities are expanding in innovative startups developing foundational technologies for the AI era, and Eliyan could be at the forefront.

Source: https://techfundingnews.com/cisco-backed-silicon-valley-startup-eliyan-raises-145m-at-1b-valuation-to-build-the-future-of-ai-interconnects/

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