NetApp Discreetly Acquires Israeli Start-Up Cognigo for $70 Million

According to Israeli Globes, a credible Israeli information source, NetApp, Inc. acquired secretly start-up Cognigo, registered as D.Day Labs LTD., for around $70 million.

The news was not published by NetApp but was also confirmed on Twitter by Cognigo.

Cognigo HQs is in Jersey City, NJ with R&D centre in Tel Aviv.

The Israel firm offers a platform for data protection and adapting it to the various privacy regulations worldwide such as GDPR, using AI technology and natural language processing in order to categorize every piece of data according to the regulations required for specific types of data. It supports structured and unstructured data – both for on premise and cloud data silos.

Sources closed to the companies told Globes that the two firms have collaborated for several years. Cognigo is also a partner of Microsoft in cybersecurity.

Cognigo’s 35 employees are joining NetApp’s Israel development centre, having already 80 to 90 employees and born following of the acquisition of other Israeli start-up Onaro.

Cognigo was founded in August 2015 by its CEO Guy Leibovitz and raised $10.9 million in two rounds, $2.4 million in seed round in 2016 and $8.5 million in 2018 in series A from OurCrowd, Mitvah Shamir, State of Mind Ventures and Prosegur Tech Ventures.

It has $5 million in estimated revenue annually according to crunchbase.

NetApp already acquired at least two Israel-based storage start-ups: Plexistor Ltd. in May 2017, in software that turns off-the-shelf servers into high-performance converged infrastructure offerings with persistent memory technologies, and Onaro, in solutions management and control of storage networks (SRM), in January 2008, for $120 million.

Cognigo is the 21th acquisition of NetApp since 2000.