A who’s who of big tech names have contributed to a $90 million funding round in storage company Cohesity.
Co-led by Sequoia Capital and GV, formerly Google Ventures, new participants Cisco Investments and HPE joined the Series C funding round as strategic investors.
Accel, ARTIS Ventures, Battery Ventures, DHVC (formerly Danhua Capital), Foundation Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, Trinity Ventures and Wing Venture Capital were also involved in the funding round.
Cohesity embarked on the funding round due to a rapid uptick in customer demand for its hyperconverged secondary storage platform, which debuted over one year ago. The $90 million raised and the big names involved point to the storage company as being one of the names to watch in the hyperconverged space.
“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 at 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 data storage developed by CEO and founder Mohit Aron. Aron first introduced the concept of hyperconverged infrastructure at primary storage company Nutanix, which he co-founded in 2009. The company’s offering 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.
“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 data use cases.”
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The new funding will go towards expanding the company’s worldwide sales and marketing to meet the surge in customer demand, with R&D also set to benefit from the additional investment. Such R&D efforts include looking at secondary storage use cases beyond data protection, with a special focus on analytics, test/dev, file services and object services.
“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,” said CEO and founder Aron. “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.”
