Hyperconverged Startup Cohesity Hits $200M Annual Sales Pace

Nico Grant (Bloomberg) -- Cohesity Inc., a data-storage company backed by SoftBank Group Corp., disclosed some of the sales-growth numbers that prompted Masayoshi Son’s Vision Fund to make a rare investment in enterprise technology.

The closely held company, whose software connects organizations’ various data backup systems, said it has reached an annual revenue run rate -- a calculation of the annual number based on the current level of sales -- of more than $200 million, compared with $100 million two quarters ago. Sales almost quadrupled in fiscal 2018, which ended July 31, the San Jose, California-based company said Tuesday in a statement.

Under Chief Executive Officer Mohit Aron, who also co-founded Nutanix Inc., Cohesity has grown by enticing large corporations to use its products that let customers view all of their data held on different systems through one portal. The company’s deepening partnerships with cloud vendors Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google have also proven beneficial for Cohesity, whose clients have started adopting the cloud. The data-backup company quadrupled the size of its customer base in the last fiscal year, adding names including Hyatt Hotels Corp. and LendingClub Corp.

Cohesity on Tuesday announced an application, Helios, that lets customers manage and gain insights from their data with analytics and machine-learning tools. The company, founded in 2013, is now expanding internationally in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and has designs on the Asia-Pacific region next. Aron said Cohesity would evaluate when it might be interested in an initial public offering.

“The determination on an IPO is dependent on the economic times,” he said in an interview. “Sometimes investors are looking for growth, sometimes they’re looking for profitability. If you look for profitability, we can get there in a few quarters.” Still, the company wouldn’t choose to go public just for money, given its support from SoftBank, he said.

The SoftBank Vision Fund in June led a $250 million round in Cohesity -- only the second time that the fund has invested in an enterprise tech company.