Cohesity Raises $90 Million, Total at $190 Million

Cohesity, Inc., in hyperconverged secondary storage, announced its largest funding to date, raising over $90 million in a Series C round co-led by investors GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Sequoia Capital.

Cisco Investments and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP (HPE) also participated in this round as strategic investors, joining Accel Ventures, ARTIS Ventures, Battery Ventures, DHVC (formerly Danhua Capital), Foundation Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, Trinity Ventures and Wing Venture Capital.

This participation validates the company in the storage industry.

The decision to seek additional funding was driven by a rapid uptick in customer demand for the firm’s hyperconverged secondary storage platform, which debuted over one year ago.

Hyperconverged Secondary Storage Game Changer for Enterprise
Companies are grappling with a vast amount of data that is flooding their organizations. Cohesity delivers a way to manage this surge in data volume and complexity. By consolidating a range of secondary storage workloads – from backups to analytics – into a software-defined platform that spans both on-premises and public cloud environments, customers can reduce storage capacity requirements, simplify complicated data management processes and extract more value from their data. Cohesity differentiates itself from other vendors in the space by providing a web-scale platform that consolidates all secondary data use cases, not just backups.

“Given the tsunami of data flowing through businesses, hyperconverged secondary storage is now a must-have for enterprise companies. Customers are recognizing the tremendous value that Cohesity provides for managing all of their data in a single platform,” said Bill Coughran, partner, Sequoia Capital, and Cohesity board member. “Market interest is driving this round of funding, which will be used to help us meet the accelerating demand.”

GV’s decision to co-lead the funding round with Sequoia Capital underscores the power of Cohesity’s new vision for storage developed by CEO and founder Mohit Aron. He first introduced the concept of hyperconverged infrastructure at primary storage company Nutanix, which he co-founded in 2009.

Cohesity enables customers to consolidate and simplify secondary storage across on-premises and cloud infrastructure, leveraging the same data assets to handle a variety of different workloads and drive new revenue streams.

Today the company also announced its latest offering, Cohesity Release 4.0, which adds new capabilities such as native S3-compatible object storage, a new NAS adapter for expanded data protection coverage and erasure coding for increased storage efficiency, all on a web-scale, software-defined platform.

Investment Fuels Expansion and Advances Company Vision
The start-up will use the new funding to expand its worldwide sales and marketing footprint to meet the surge in customer demand. The investment will also accelerate its R&D of additional secondary storage use cases beyond data protection, with a special focus on analytics, test/dev, file services and object services.

“Cohesity’s ability to consolidate diverse secondary storage workloads is an impressive technical feat: it represents a fundamental shift in the way that companies manage and store data,” said GV general partner Karim Faris. “Customers are demanding that their data protection systems do more than simple backup in a world with an increasing volume of use cases for their data.“

GV has a long history of investing in transformational technologies that change industries, including Cloudera, Flatiron Health, Nest and Uber.

Sequoia Capital is one of the leading venture firms in Silicon Valley, having funded companies that now represent $1.4 trillion in stock market value, including Cisco, Google, LinkedIn, Palo Alto Networks, and WhatsApp.

“With Cohesity, we have re-envisioned the way that enterprises store, manage and use data, and we’ve seen strong validation for our platform from both customers and investors,” Aron said. “This round was more than two times oversubscribed, but we capped it at the amount needed to safely grow the business to become cash-flow positive. We look forward to bringing hyperconverged secondary storage to many more companies around the globe this year.”

New Strategic Investors
Based on their objective to support innovative enterprise technologies complementary to their businesses, industry pioneers Cisco Investments and HPE joined this new round. With this investment, Cohesity enters the Hewlett Packard Pathfinder, designed to identify ventures with the greatest potential and co-sell joint solutions via the HPE Complete program. As an HPE partner, Cohesity can leverage HPE’s global reach, customer trust and enterprise expertise.

“Our focus for the Pathfinder program is to identify category-leading companies with the greatest potential. We architect joint go-to-market solutions with our portfolio companies, and create an ecosystem that can solve critical problems for customers,” said Vishal Lall, SVP, corporate strategy, HPE. “We are excited to invest is a company defining an innovative approach to secondary storage and look forward to helping them scale leveraging our global reach, customer relationships and enterprise technology expertise.”

“Cohesity’s unique, software-based approach to secondary storage helps simplify storage for customers,” said Rob Salvagno, head of Cisco Investments and VP of Cisco corporate development. “We’re excited to become investors in a company that is driving innovation in storage under the leadership of a seasoned management team with broad industry expertise.”

“We continue to be inspired by the company’s flawless execution and Mohit’s vision of transforming secondary storage. We feel strongly that Cohesity is an iconic company in the making and decided to double down on our initial investment to further accelerate the company’s trajectory. Trinity is honored to be a partner with Mohit and the Cohesity team on their mission to bring web scale hyper-convergence to the massive secondary storage market that is craving innovation,” said Karan Mehandru, general partner, Trinity Ventures.

“It’s no surprise that Cohesity’s approach to data management has garnered so much demand in such a short period of time. The Cohesity platform is a transformative way to store and protect secondary data-the only one capable of keeping pace with the ever-rising deluge that modern companies have to contend with. More and more enterprise customers have come to discover that they simply can’t live, or work, without it,” said Ashu Garg, general partner, Foundation Capital.

“We’re thrilled by the stellar progress that Cohesity has been making. The market has clearly recognized the huge benefits that hyperconverged secondary storage delivers in terms of efficiency and enhanced business agility,” said Gaurav Garg, founding partner, Wing Venture Capital and Cohesity board member.

“The combination of Cohesity’s top-notch team and its rapid progress in building cutting-edge products made it an easy decision to double down on our previous investment. As the company expands beyond backup storage to address larger pieces of the storage market, we anticipate more growth,” said Neeraj Agrawal, general partner, Battery Ventures.

“Cohesity has done an outstanding job of addressing a market that was ripe for disruption. Mohit and his team have demonstrated they can successfully address the volume and complexity of data in secondary storage, while simplifying the process for their customers. There’s not much more you can ask for,” said Stuart Peterson, founder and senior partner, ARTIS Ventures.

“The storage industry is going through a big shift as companies look for new ways to handle large amounts of data that need to traverse complex computing environments, which typically include both cloud-based and on-premises infrastructure. Cohesity 4.0 advances the company’s forward-thinking vision by breaking down data silos and consolidating even more use cases onto a single multi-cloud platform. We believe this approach sets the new standard for enterprises across the globe and we’re thrilled to continue our investment in Cohesity as the company doubles down on its growth,” said Eric Wolford, venture partner, Accel.

“Not only has Cohesity impressed the market with a transformative and visionary offering for the secondary storage market, they have executed a disciplined and impressive go-to-market strategy. We are thrilled to partner with Cohesity as they embark on this next stage of their growth,” said Kevin Ding, MD, DHVC (formerly Danhua Capital).

“We have been very impressed with Cohesity’s innovative approach to the hyperconverged secondary storage market and team’s excellent execution. We are excited about Mohit’s vision and look forward to supporting Mohit and the Cohesity team as they continue to revolutionize the secondary storage market,” said Quinn Li, VP and global head, Qualcomm Ventures.