Eliyan, HyperLight, Lumilens Receive New Funding
These startups are developing packaging-based products to address the bottlenecks in AI data centers
By Mark LaPedus
Three startups— Eliyan, HyperLight and Lumilens--have recently received new funding.
These startups are separately developing new packaging-based products to address the bottlenecks in AI data centers and other applications.
Lumilens, a San Jose, Calif.-based startup, this week emerged from stealth mode. Lumilens has raised more than $700 million in new funding co-led by Atreides Management, Bain Capital Ventures, Meritech, Seligman Ventures and Spark Capital, with participation from Addition, Alkeon, Harbourvest, J.P. Morgan Private Capital, Mayfield, MVP Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Peak XV, Redpoint Ventures, Seifdune and other investors.
The financing values Lumilens at $5.51 billion and brings its total capital raised to over $900 million.
In two years after its founding, the company is shipping its first product into AI data centers. Lumilens designs, develops and manufactures near-package optics (NPO), co-packaged optics (CPO), and pluggable optical transceivers for hyperscaler AI data centers.
Built on Lumilens’ own silicon photonics, mixed-signal ICs, electrical-optical interposers, and optical systems, the company’s LumiCore platform enables tighter integration, higher bandwidth density, lower power consumption, and greater flexibility across AI network architectures.
Meanwhile, based in Santa Clara, Calif., Eliyan last week completed its Series C funding with a total of $145 million. The round was led by Seligman Ventures, with participation from additional new and existing investors, including two new strategic investors: Cisco Investments and Lumentum.
Umesh Padval, managing partner of Seligman Ventures, will join Eliyan’s board.
The financing will be used to expand Eliyan’s development efforts of its next-generation interconnect technologies and products, expand ecosystem partnerships, and scale manufacturing.
Eliyan hopes to solve a major problem. As AI infrastructure scales from single accelerators to rack-scale and cluster-scale systems, interconnect bandwidth, memory capacity, and power efficiency are increasingly becoming primary constraints on system performance, according to the company.
“Eliyan’s technologies are designed to eliminate these bottlenecks by enabling efficient communication across compute, memory, and electro-optical domains,” according to the company. “The company’s silicon-proven NuLink PHYs and NuGear chiplet families provide scalable connectivity solutions optimized to address the growing challenges of I/O, memory, and power ‘walls’ in AI scale-up and scale-in networks. Its expansion into optical interconnect will complement its existing strengths in electrical interconnect as it supports the industry transition toward increasingly heterogeneous, co-packaged, and bandwidth-intensive compute fabrics.”
And not to be outdone, HyperLight, which is developing thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) photonics technology, recently announced the closing of an $80 million Series C financing round led by MediaTek.
The round includes participation from UMC Capital, Jabil, Foxconn, EDBI (arm of SG Growth Capital, the investment platform of the Singapore Economic Development Board and Enterprise Singapore), CDIB-TEN Capital, and Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), as well as strategic investors from leading silicon IC and networking companies. Existing investors Summit Partners, The Engine, Foothill Ventures, and Xora Innovation continue to actively support the company’s growth.
Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., HyperLight is developing the TFLN Chiplet platform. This combines the optical characteristics of thin-film TFLN with scalable CMOS-like fabrication techniques.
“Thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) is a superior optical material that enables photonic integrated circuits (PICs) to perform beyond the limitations of silicon photonics,” according to HyperLight. “Lithium niobate, often called the ‘silicon of photonics,’ has long been the gold standard for high-speed modulators due to its intrinsic low-loss and ultrafast electro-optic Pockels effect. Unlike traditional bulk lithium niobate devices, TFLN leverages semiconductor manufacturing processes to achieve tightly confined optical waveguides, enabling PICs with unprecedented bandwidth, low voltage operation, compact size, and exceptional reliability.”