Data Manager Cohesity Pushes VC Total Past $650M

Cohesity, the data management specialist and cash magnet, has raised another quarter-of-a-billion dollars in its latest funding round.

That total, $250 million, matches an earlier series D round that closed in June 2018, bringing the six-year-old company’s total venture haul to a more than $650 million. The company claims its market valuation has doubled in less than two years to $2.5 billion.

The second quarter-billion-dollar funding round in less than two years was led by DFJ Growth, Foundation Capital, Greenspring Associates and Wing Venture Capital. DFJ Growth and Greenspring Associates are new investors, along with Baillie Gifford and Sozo Ventures.

Existing investors including Sequoia Capital and SoftBank along with strategic investors Cisco Investments and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE).

Cohesity, founded by Mohit Aron (an early Google employee and co-founder of hyperconverged platform vendor Nutanix), said Thursday (April 9) it would use the cash infusion to expand R&D. The software-defined data management specialist works with large enterprises to consolidate fragmented data silos containing archives, file shares and object stores along with data used for analytics.

The value proposition is a single window for managing enterprise data stored in-house, in the cloud or at the network edge. Customers can then apply analytics and other applications to make sense of it all.

That strategy is gaining traction as more enterprises turn to hyperconverged infrastructure based on software-defined storage and other forms of hardware virtualization. For example, market tracker Omdia predicts the software-defined storage market will grow at a 28-percent annual clip through 2023, reaching an estimated $86 billion as demand for standalone storage products and backbone hyperconverged infrastructure continues to surge.

While Cohesity works mainly with large Fortune 500 companies, market analysts note the current software-defined storage boom is partially driven by the relative ease of deploying and operating hyperconverged infrastructure. Moreover, as enterprise storage demand soars, the hyperconverged approach has made it easier and cheaper to add capacity without the need for highly-trained IT administrators.

Data management is also seen as critical to the success of AI and machine learning efforts.

“More enterprises globally are abandoning legacy offerings in favor of our modern, software-defined approach to data management that is incredibly simple to use—critical during these challenging times as customers are looking to reduce total cost of ownership while enabling remote IT teams,” Aron, Cohesity’s founder, said in announcing the results of its latest funding round.

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