SoftBank Leads $250 Million Investment for Cohesity Data Storage

Emily McCormick (Bloomberg) -- SoftBank Group Corp.’s Vision Fund led a $250 million investment in Cohesity Inc. to help the California-based data-storage company expand globally.

The funding round, which also included Cisco Investments, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital and Sequoia Capital, brings Cohesity’s total equity raised to $410 million, surpassing all other Series D enterprise investments in the U.S. in the last 18 months, according to a company statement Monday. The funding marks just the second instance of SoftBank investing in a company focused on enterprise software, Cohesity said.

The startup’s current valuation wasn’t disclosed. Recode reported in April that Cohesity could be valued around $900 million before the new money.

Founded in 2013, Cohesity streamlines corporate data management by converging secondary data, such as system backups and analytics, and connecting these across the public cloud, private cloud or storage hardware. It competes with companies like Dell Technologies Inc. and CommVault Systems Inc., among others.

Cohesity said it was using the investment to “power large-scale global expansion by attacking a problem that enterprises currently spend an estimated $60 billion each year to address.”

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Chief Executive Officer Mohit Aron previously co-founded another enterprise software company, Nutanix Inc., which went public in 2016.

The SoftBank Vision Fund, run by Masayoshi Son, the founder and CEO of Japan’s SoftBank, has almost $100 billion that it invests primarily in technology companies. The fund has backed startups including Uber Technologies Inc., Nvidia Corp. and DoorDash Inc.