Our Investment in Cohesity
Data is king. And those who use it to gain insight are able to rule. Driven by the unprecedented rise in devices and systems that generate data, and the insatiable appetite for enterprises to consume and analyze it, secondary storage, that includes the “capacity tier,” which backs up the “performance tier” is experiencing accelerated and unabated growth. In most cases, the secondary storage budget for data hungry enterprises is 3–5 times the primary storage budget. Yet, there has been no innovation in this tier of storage for over a decade.
Enterprises have been at the mercy of buying capacity to meet peak demands, exceeding capacity in half the expected time, forklift upgrades of infrastructure that are disruptive, disparate and fragmented workflows that span backup, archival and recovery and massive inefficiencies in the ecosystem. The lack of innovation is not because there is a lack of awareness about the problem, but because solving it requires a deep understanding of enterprise-scale storage systems. It requires an ability to architect a system that scales infinitely to converge all these different silos of storage, while still delivering all the key storage services for resiliency, data integrity, operational continuity, etc. In short, this stuff is hard, really really hard! Few can envision such an audacious goal, and even fewer who can deliver on it. This is where Cohesity comes in, led by its founder and CEO, Mohit Aron.
Mohit founded Cohesity with a singular focus on revolutionizing storage by rethinking the entire secondary storage ecosystem. Cohesity fundamentally questions all the assumptions that most storage administrators take for granted today. Why can’t all of secondary storage — including backup, archival, replication, test/dev and analytics be consolidated in a simple, unified and intuitive workflow? Why do enterprises need software from 5 different vendors? Why couldn’t secondary storage scale out infinitely without forklift upgrades? Why are appliances left idle and passive most of the time? Couldn’t one unified, consolidated storage system with a simple interface allow storage administrators to meet all their needs? And could this appliance cost a fraction of the capital and operational costs that enterprises pay today? Could anyone build it? Mohit and his team believed two years ago that the answer to all these questions was a resounding Yes! I not only agree but believe that there is only one team on the planet that can solve this problem and disrupt this $50B market.
Today, I am delighted to announce Trinity’s investment in Cohesity and the world-class team led by Mohit Aron!
I have known Mohit for 5 years and have the pleasure of calling him a friend. His career spans a decade of delivering world-class products to the market by challenging status quo and not settling for anything but the absolute best. He built the scale-out file system (GFS) at Google and architected the Aster Data platform. Most recently he was the founder, CTO and chief architect at Nutanix where he pioneered Nutanix’s converged primary storage appliance and led the company to being one of the fastest growing storage companies. Mohit has proven that delivering amazing products to the enterprise storage and big data markets is what he does best. And now he’s on a mission again at Cohesity, along with a stellar team around him from Google, VMware, Nutanix, Riverbed and other leading companies.
Trinity Ventures is proud to back the team at Cohesity and to support the vision that started this amazing company. We’re also excited to partner with Sequoia, Wing and other investors who share our passion for the company, market and the team.
Team Cohesity — Welcome to the Trinity family!
