Cohesity Closes Massive $250M Funding Round With Investments From Softbank, HPE, Cisco

Storage vendor Cohesity Monday unveiled the raising of a massive $250 million round of funding the company will use to expand its market.

That brings total investment in Cohesity, which develops hyper-converged infrastructure technology targeting secondary storage, to $410 million, said Rob Salmon, president and chief operating officer for the San Jose, Calif.-based company.

Salmon, who late last year joined Cohesity after a 29-year stint at NetApp, said he has been meeting over the past eight months with countless customers and partners to discuss the company and industry.

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"I really believe Cohesity is offering the architecture that's going to be what everything else is measured against in the future," he said.

Some big-name investors seem to have taken that message to heart as Cohesity enjoyed what Salmon called an oversubscribed funding round. The round was led by Japan's Softbank Vision Fund, and included funding from such strategic investors as Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cisco Systems and Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital.

Salmon said the funding will be used in part to expand Cohesity's global presence, especially in Asia where it can take advantage of Softbank's expertise and presence.

The funding will carry Cohesity far into the future, according to Salmon. "This may be the biggest investment round in IT in the last 18 months in the enterprise infrastructure space," he said.

Salmon did not directly say whether Cohesity is cash-flow-positive, or whether it is profitable. "We always have an eye on cash-flow-positive," he said. "But we also keep our eye on profitability. But our focus today is driving customer adoption of our technology."

Having HPE and Cisco as strategic partners is helpful to a young company like Cohesity, Salmon said.

"We have go-to-market activities with both," he said. "Our software runs on Cisco UCS and on HPE servers. We'll be at this week's Cisco Live and next week's HPE Discover event."

Salmon said to not expect much in terms of news from Cohesity at either event. However, he did say that Cisco Live will see an emphasis on the new integration with Cisco HyperFlex hyper-converged infrastructure that Cohesity recently unveiled.

Because Cohesity focuses on the software side of the business, and works with either HPE or Cisco as partners and offers its own appliances with third-party white-box servers, the company does not have sales conflicts with its investors, Salmon said.

"Our value is in the software," he said. "Our biggest focus is on partners including Cisco and HPE. We also have started sell our software to partners for deployment on customers' servers, although we need to qualify the servers first."

Cohesity has put together both a solid technology and a solid channel program, and will likely expand both with the new funding, said Mike Piltoff, senior vice president for strategic marketing at Champion Solutions Group, a Boca Raton, Fla.-based solution provider and longtime Cohesity channel partner.

Because of Cohesity's software-defined storage model, all the capabilities of its hyper-converged data protection technology, including backup, recovery, replication, restores, deduplication and more, can be done via a single GUI, Piltoff told CRN.

"The target and tools are together in a single all-in-one appliance," he said.

Cohesity allows customers easily work off a target appliance even during a recovery of data after a data center failure, Piltoff said.

"Just point and click, and you can do recovery while being up and running," he said. "And the solution scales. They've really thought out the software-defined aspect. You can't design a Cohesity data protection solution without redundancy. It's fail-proof."