Cohesity Emerged From Steath Mode …

Cohesity, Inc., in converged secondary storage, has raised a total of $70 million in venture capital funding to create an infinitely scalable storage solution that converges all secondary storage workflows for data protection, development, and analytics onto a single, intelligent platform.

The company closed a Series A round of $15 million led by Sequoia Capital and Wing Venture Capital in late 2013, followed up last month by a $55 million Series B investment round led by ARTIS Ventures and Qualcomm Incorporated, through its venture investment group, Qualcomm Ventures, with additional investment from Accel Partners, Battery Ventures, Google Ventures, and Trinity Ventures.

The company believes that the Cohesity Data Platform will eliminate the current fragmentation and data sprawl in secondary storage by leveraging a Google-like, web-scale architecture to converge these data silos for data protection, development, and analytics onto a single, intelligent platform that empowers businesses to simultaneously manage, protect, and learn from their data. While purpose-built primary storage make sense for critical production applications, Cohesity’s solution is designed to help businesses realize efficiencies across secondary storage by alleviating the costly management overhead of using separate products and eliminating redundant data copies across these silos.

Cohesity was founded in June 2013 by CEO Mohit Aron, who pioneered the concept of hyper-convergence, the first architecture to converge compute and storage to simplify virtualization. He founded the infrastructure company Nutanix to bring hyper-convergence to market and served as its CTO before leaving to build Cohesity. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rice University, and also worked as a staff engineer at Google from 2003 to 2007, where he helped design the company’s Google File System.

“After converging compute and storage at Nutanix for virtualized applications in the primary storage landscape, I still felt that there was a lot of fragmentation and overspend where the larger bulk of the data sits – in secondary storage,” Aron said. “Point solutions like data deduplication, copy data management and integrated backup appliances act as Band-Aids, but only by bringing the data together in one place can customers manage it truly efficiently and start to derive valuable business insight from this dark data. Secondary storage makes up over 80% of an organization’s data – it’s where the majority of data goes to die today, so it’s exactly the right place to run data analytics, transforming the value of this previously passive data.”

Investing in Google Innovation for the Enterprise
Cohesity plans to leverage its venture capital backing to transform the secondary storage market by bringing together capabilities currently provided by a vast array of storage vendors on a single, unified platform that empowers organizations to reap the financial benefits of Google-like, web-scale economics, and do more with their data. Key backing from top-tier investors, including Google Ventures and Sequoia Capital, bolsters Cohesity’s mission to reinvent the way business thinks about its secondary storage infrastructure.

“With Mohit’s experience at Google and his pioneering of the hyper-convergence movement at Nutanix, we felt he would be an excellent partner to bring web-scale innovation to the massive volume of data that customers keep in secondary storage,” said Sequoia Capital partner and former Google SVP of engineering Bill Coughran.

“Industry attention has long been focused on primary storage, while the market for secondary storage has not seen as much innovation over the past decade,” said Google Ventures general partner Karim Faris. “Most of the bits will end up in secondary storage, so this represents a very large market opportunity for Cohesity. Mohit’s deep experience in scale-out architectures uniquely positions the Cohesity team to deliver new and innovative functionality at a much lower cost.”

Secondary Storage Market Ripe For Convergence
“We believe Cohesity’s web-scale experience and converged architecture approach is uniquely positioned to simplify how customers protect and use their data – an opportunity which IDC estimates at nearly $50 billion this year,” said ARTIS Ventures general partner and founder Stuart Peterson. “While Mohit and his team remarkably transformed primary storage environments with a software-defined approach at Nutanix, that was just the tip of the iceberg. We see an even larger opportunity for the volume and complexity of data in secondary storage environments.”

“Primary storage has seen major disruption the last few years, but in secondary storage, there’s only been a few point innovations,” said Charles Curran, senior director, Qualcomm Ventures. “The Cohesity team is uniquely experienced to bring their Google File System knowledge to remake this complex and fractured secondary storage landscape.”

The additional funding will help Cohesity scale its engineering, sales, and marketing teams to ramp up ahead of the general release of the Cohesity Data Platform.

Sequoia Capital Partner Bill Coughran and Wing Venture Capital Founding Partner Gaurav Garg joined Cohesity’s board of directors at the time of the Series A funding round to guide the company through growth.

“Mohit’s vision for transforming secondary storage workflows is incredibly powerful,” Garg said. “We are excited by Cohesity’s plans to help firms simultaneously manage, store, and learn from their data.”

The company has begun pilots with select clients and is now expanding availability with its Early Access Program.

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