Eliyan built a foundry-agnostic die-to-die interconnect PHY (NuLink) and sold it into AI accelerators, memory, and chiplet stacks. Now it is taking $145M at a $1B valuation to build out electro-optical interconnects. Cisco Investments and Lumentum are among the new strategic investors. When an optical module supplier leads a die-to-die interconnect company's round, the subtext is that the two are converging on a shared problem: bandwidth density between compute tiles is hitting the limit of what copper traces can carry at acceptable power and reach.
The constraint is structural. At rack scale and cluster scale, AI inference and training require bandwidth that copper scale-up networks cannot deliver within the power budget of the surrounding infrastructure. Co-packaged optics and near-package optics are not research projects at this point; they are engineering problems with timelines. Eliyan is betting that the company that already owns the electrical PHY layer can also own the optical interface, giving chiplet designers a continuous interconnect platform from intra-package copper to system-level optical fabric.
Lumentum's presence as a strategic investor is the tell. Lumentum makes optical components for datacom and telecom. A round that includes both a networking infrastructure company (Cisco) and an optical component supplier means Eliyan is not pitching a chiplet story to hyperscalers in the abstract; it is pitching integration with the optical supply chain that hyperscalers already buy from. Suppliers of traditional copper PHY IP that do not have an optical roadmap are now competing against a company with $145M, Cisco connectivity relationships, and Lumentum component access. That combination will close a round at a chiplet designer within 12 months.