SoftBank’s Vision Fund leads $250m series D investment into data storage tech firm Cohesity

Californian data storage firm Cohesity has closed an oversubscribed series D round at $250m (£186.2m), led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund in its second ever enterprise investment after workspace messaging app Slack.

The round also saw participation from Cisco Investments, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital and Sequoia Capital. Cohesity’s chief operating officer and president Rob Salmon said it brings the firm’s total fundraising to $410m.

Cohesity, which helps businesses by consolidating data stored on secondary silos onto one “hyperconverged” cloud-based data platform, said it will be using the investment to fund “large-scale global expansion”, in light of the support it will get from stalwarts like Cisco and HPE.

According to CEO and founder Mohit Aron, its annual revenues grew 600 per cent between 2016 and 2017, and it onboarded more than 200 new enterprise customers in the last two quarters.

Deep Nishar, senior managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, said the firm believes that Cohesity’s “Google-like approach” is changing the business of information technology in a fundamental way.

Read more: SoftBank Vision Fund to invest £1.69bn in GM self-driving tech unit

The Vision Fund is a $100bn investment vehicle led by SoftBank and backed by the likes of Apple, Qualcomm and the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi, with stakes in tech giants like Uber and WeWork.

“My vision has always been to provide enterprises with cloud-like simplicity for their many fragmented applications and data – backup, test and development, analytics, and more,” Aron continued.

“Cohesity has built significant momentum and market share during the last 12 months and we are just getting started. We succeed because our customers are some of the world’s brightest and most fanatical IT organisations, and are an extension of our development efforts.”