Hyperconverged Secondary Storage Is a Game Changer for the Enterprise
Companies are grappling with a vast amount of data that is flooding their organizations. Cohesity delivers a radically efficient way to manage this surge in data volume and complexity. By consolidating a wide 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 dramatically 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 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. 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 4.0, which adds compelling 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
Cohesity 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 Cohesity’s research and development 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 data use cases.”
GV has a long history of investing in transformational technologies that change entire 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 its objective to support highly innovative and groundbreaking enterprise technologies complementary to its business, Cisco Investments joined this new round.
“Cohesity’s unique, software-based approach to secondary storage helps simplify storage for customers,” said Rob Salvagno, head of Cisco Investments and vice president 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.”
Industry pioneer Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) also joined the funding round as a strategic investor, adding Cohesity to the Hewlett Packard Pathfinder program, designed to fund ventures with the greatest potential and include their products in HPE enterprise solutions. As an HPE Pathfinder partner, Cohesity can leverage HPE’s global footprint, customer trust and enterprise expertise to accelerate its revenue trajectory.
“Our focus for the Pathfinder program is to identify category-leading companies with the greatest potential. In addition to investing in these leading companies, we integrate them into our solutions and architect joint go-to-market programs with them. This unique approach enables us to offer differentiated and industry-leading solutions to solve critical problems for customers,” said Vishal Lall, SVP, Strategy and Ventures, HPE. “We are excited to invest in Cohesity as they have developed an innovative approach to secondary storage and look forward to helping them scale by leveraging our global reach, customer relationships and enterprise technology expertise.”
