Earlier today Cohesity announced the closing of a transformative combination with Veritas’ enterprise data protection business, creating the world’s largest data protection provider. We believe this marks a pivotal moment not only for Cohesity, but also for the broader data security landscape, with the combined entity redefining standards in data protection and security.
This acquisition, coupled with Cohesity’s impressive growth, reinforces our belief that the company is well-positioned to drive innovation in data security with groundbreaking products like Gaia AI, while gaining market share through the platform’s unparalleled depth. We are proud to be on this journey with Cohesity, backing the company’s Series H, and are looking forward to what’s ahead.
The Largest, Most Comprehensive Data Protection Provider
The combination brings together Cohesity’s innovative data management platform and Veritas’ extensive enterprise experience, resulting in unmatched product breadth. From multi-cloud data protection to zero-trust security principles, the new entity offers a comprehensive portfolio designed to meet the needs of the most demanding global enterprises.
With this transaction, Cohesity becomes the largest data protection provider by market share with over 12,000 enterprise customers, including 85 of the Fortune 100 and nearly 70% of the Global 500. The combined company pro forma revenue for the fiscal year ended July 2024 exceeded $1.7 billion and together, the businesses have more than $1.5 billion in annual recurring revenue. Cohesity reached the $1.5+ billion revenue mark in just 11 years, making it the fastest data protection business to reach that milestone. These underscore the company’s unparalleled scale and highlight its position as a dominant force in the large and rapidly growing market for data security.
Cohesity Gaia: AI-Powered Insights That Transform Data
One of the most exciting aspects of the platform is the recently introduced Cohesity Gaia, a cutting-edge AI-powered conversational assistant. Gaia brings large language models (LLMs) and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) to an enterprise’s data, allowing enterprise users to interact with their data through natural language queries. This not only enhances decision-making, but also unlocks deep insights that can dramatically improve organizational workflows. For example, a customer can use Gaia to search through emails in a subset of company inboxes for specific topics in order to investigate a compliance issue. Gaia’s AI Assistant uses a large language model to highlight relevant emails and documents in a user-friendly format that were found in the customer’s environment.
Gaia allows users to quickly retrieve relevant information from petabytes of data spread across multi-cloud environments and gain actionable insights that can help streamline data operations. This exemplifies how AI can revolutionize enterprise data management by turning vast repositories of information into strategic assets.
World-Class Team with a Deep Commitment to Customers & Continued Innovation
Sanjay Poonen,
President and Corporate Officer, Cohesity
The Sapphire team has had a long-standing relationship with Cohesity’s CEO and President, Sanjay Poonen, dating back to his time at SAP, where he served as President and Corporate Officer, overseeing the applications and platform solutions and sales teams. Sanjay has always been a strong supporter of Sapphire Ventures throughout the years, and we have continued to stay connected, following his remarkable success, including his impactful years at VMware. We are excited to support Sanjay and the Cohesity leadership team in their journey of becoming a leader in data protection.
In addition to being consistently impressed by Sanjay, the Cohesity team sets itself apart by being committed to a “no customer left behind” philosophy, demonstrating the company’s continued focus on its customer base which includes marquee names like Nasdaq, Nationwide, Delta, Broadcom and Salesforce, amongst others. Staying true to its purpose, Cohesity is guaranteeing long-term support for existing products across both portfolios, providing customers with the flexibility to evolve their data strategies on their terms. This philosophy is paired with the team’s relentless innovation, as Cohesity integrates its scalable, AI-powered data management capabilities with Veritas’ proven enterprise solutions. With a focus on zero-trust security principles, cloud-native architectures and AI-driven insights, we believe Cohesity is setting the industry benchmark for empowering customers to not only protect their data but to harness its full potential.
At Sapphire Ventures, we’re thrilled to partner with Cohesity in this transformative chapter. The combined company’s scale, innovation and commitment to excellence embody what we seek in Companies of Consequence. As Cohesity continues to lead the industry with groundbreaking technologies like Gaia, we look forward to supporting its journey to redefine data security for years to come.
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Nothing presented within this article is intended to constitute investment advice, and under no circumstances should any information provided herein be used or considered as an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy an interest in any investment fund managed by Sapphire Ventures (“Sapphire”). Information provided reflects Sapphires’ views as of a time, whereby such views are subject to change at any point and Sapphire shall not be obligated to provide notice of any change. Companies mentioned in this article are a representative sample of portfolio companies in which Sapphire has invested in which the author believes such companies fit the objective criteria stated in commentary, which do not reflect all investments made by Sapphire. A complete alphabetical list of Sapphire’s investments made by Its direct growth and sports investing strategies is available here. No assumptions should be made that investments described were or will be profitable. Due to various risks and uncertainties, actual events, results or the actual experience may differ materially from those reflected or contemplated in these statements. Nothing contained in this article may be relied upon as a guarantee or assurance as to the future success of any particular company. Past performance is not indicative of future results.
