Marching Forward with Cohesity to Redefine Data Management
By Randy Glein, Sandesh Patnam, and Kevin Tu, DFJ Growth
At DFJ Growth, our mission is simple. We partner with visionary entrepreneurs who are pursuing big ideas and see the future before others, backing their companies during the hypergrowth phase of development. We make these decisions deliberately, based on inspiration and conviction in their ability to transform an industry. Today, we are delighted to announce that we’ve been inspired by Mohit Aron and his team at Cohesity, teaming up with them to lead their new growth round of financing. It is a true privilege to join their team, as Cohesity marches forward as the new generation leader reimagining and reinventing enterprise data management.
While we are excited to announce our partnership with Cohesity, we are also conscious of the global health pandemic and economic crisis our society is currently facing. It would be so easy to put our pencils down during this time and direct our attention inward. But innovation never sleeps, providing hope and optimism for the future, so we humbly forge ahead and partner with this extraordinary team and syndicate of investors. We are grateful to be included in their future while our thoughts center on the health and wellness of those around us.
Cohesity Enables Data as the New Currency
It’s no secret that the amount and usage of data are exploding exponentially. Companies are arming themselves with data as a strategic weapon. We’ve been investing in this trend for several years. Our focus has primarily been on finding emerging stage companies uniquely positioned to help enterprises harness, organize, and analyze their data — through unique products that bring improved insight and perspective to business decision making. Data has become the new currency in business. This is the tailwind Cohesity is riding.
When we met Cohesity and heard their vision for a software-defined data management solution that is purpose-built for the modern era, everything clicked for us. Their architectural approach breaks the mold of siloed point applications. Cohesity has developed a unique data management platform that makes backup — on-premises, in the cloud and at the edge — a snap and then enables companies to do so much more with their data. They can manage a host of data infrastructure workloads spanning archiving, files shares and object stores, dev/test and analytics all from the same data management platform using one user interface. They can also bring apps and seamless integrations to the data, enabling organizations to derive significant value from their data, whether for improving compliance, running analytics, or improving their security posture. This approach solves mass data fragmentation by consolidating all of these data workloads on a single platform, which can help customers reduce costs and free up IT resources that can then be deployed to other business-critical areas.
As product-focused investors, we observed gaps in the data management landscape and quickly converged around the opportunity to team up with Cohesity. It certainly didn’t hurt that enterprise customers raved about the unique capabilities, cost advantages, and novel use cases Cohesity enables, including benefits that come from having more unified and accessible data.
Taking a Deeper Dive on Data
Cohesity is pursuing an enormous opportunity to leverage its unified platform across multiple segments of the enterprise data management stack. This is a $60 billion market historically served by different specialized competitors in each segment. Cohesity is bringing the market together with an integrated solution that offers dramatically improved capabilities, visibility and access across disparate data sets. The industry has not seen this type of innovation in more than two decades, a long time in the era of bits and bytes.
Data management software has historically been designed to run on specialized hardware. Cohesity has changed this paradigm with a software-first architecture, creating a high performance, scalable, and inherently reliable solution without coupling it to an inflexible hardware architecture. This innovative approach allows enterprises to design solutions tailored to their needs without undue cost and hardware lock-in. In addition, Cohesity’s revolutionary file system breaks the mold of legacy approaches that resulted in massive data fragmentation. Specifically, Cohesity provides broad compatibility across data systems, supporting legacy and future architectures with minimal impact — a profound and foundational shift.
An All-Star Team
Innovative, game-changing products are conceived by brilliant founders who push the limits of what is possible, then surround themselves with all-star teams capable of creating a new reality. Mohit Aron’s experience as co-founder and CTO of Nutanix, and a lead developer and architect of the Google File System, is unparalleled. Great people follow his lead, allowing Cohesity to attract world-class talent to execute on Mohit’s vision. We often talk about “10x Engineers” — exceptionally talented technical and product teams who operate at a level far beyond the norm — these are the incredibly capable people pushing Cohesity’s product to new heights with each passing day.
We could not be more excited to join the Cohesity team as we saddle up for an exciting journey by their side.
