Chiplet interconnect manufacturer Eliyan has raised $145 million in a Series C funding round, valuing the startup at $1 billion.

The oversubscribed round was led by Seligman Ventures, with participation from both new and existing investors, including Cisco Investments and Lumentum. In addition to the funding, Umesh Padval, managing partner of Seligman Ventures, will join Eliyan’s Board of Directors.

In a statement, Eliyan said the financing will support the development of its next-generation interconnect technologies and allow the company to expand its ecosystem partnerships and scale manufacturing.

Founded in 2021 by Ramin Farjadrad, the former CTO and VP of networking at Marvell Semiconductor, along with Syrus Ziai, and Patrick Soheili, Eliyan’s chiplet interconnect technology speeds up the processing for AI chips, with the company claiming it achieves up to four times the performance and half the power of other solutions.

The company’s NuLink PHY and NuGear offerings address both die-to-die and die-to-memory interconnect challenges through its Universal Memory Interface (UMI), a bi-directional interconnect method that enables a bandwidth-efficient connection to memory, in both standard organic substrates and advanced packaging.

Chiplets are tiny integrated circuits with specialized functions, which can be combined to make larger integrated circuits. They contain multiple smaller dies, instead of one monolithic die.

"AI infrastructure is undergoing one of the largest architectural transitions in computing history," said Farjadrad, who is Eliyan's CEO.

"As compute, memory, packaging, and networking become increasingly interconnected, traditional approaches to system connectivity are reaching their limits. Eliyan was founded to address these challenges at the architectural level. This financing, together with the support of leading strategic and financial investors, positions us to accelerate product development, customer adoption, and ecosystem expansion as we help enable the next generation of AI infrastructure."