Cohesity funding: Every round, investor, and valuation (2026)

Cohesity sells software that backs up, secures, and recovers company data. Its customers use it to restore systems after a ransomware attack, keep copies of data across their own servers and public clouds, and, more recently, search that backed-up data with AI. After absorbing Veritas's enterprise data protection business, which includes the long-running NetBackup product, it is the largest data protection software provider by market share.

Cohesity has raised about $1.8 billion of equity across seven rounds since 2013, plus a $2.8 billion term loan taken out to pay for Veritas. Its last primary round, the December 2024 Series H, valued the combined company at over $7 billion.

For a decade, Cohesity was a classic venture-backed startup, funded by Sequoia, SoftBank, and a line of tech companies that also sold its products. Then it shelved an IPO, took on debt, and bought a business larger than itself. Let's dive into Cohesity's funding history.

Cohesity raised most of its venture money in two large rounds, one led by SoftBank in 2018 and one led by a group of growth funds in 2020. The 2024 Veritas financing then dwarfed everything before it, and most of that money was debt.

Mohit Aron founded Cohesity in 2013. He had helped build the Google File System and co-founded Nutanix, and his pitch was to pull the scattered jobs of backup, file storage, and test copies onto one platform. Sequoia and Wing led the Series A in late 2013.

Cohesity came out of stealth in June 2015 with a Series B led by ARTIS Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures, with Google Ventures among the backers. GV and Sequoia co-led the Series C in April 2017. Cisco and Hewlett Packard Enterprise joined that round as strategic investors, and both began selling Cohesity's software alongside their own hardware.

SoftBank's Vision Fund led the Series D in June 2018. It took total equity raised to $410 million and made Cohesity a unicorn.

The Series E closed in April 2020, in the first weeks of the pandemic. DFJ Growth, Foundation Capital, Greenspring Associates, and Wing led it, and Baillie Gifford came in as a new backer. Six months later Amazon made an undisclosed equity investment as AWS became Cohesity's preferred cloud for its backup-as-a-service product.

In March 2021 Cohesity let employees sell stock to Steadfast Capital Ventures, Premji Invest, and other buyers. That money went to the sellers, not the company. Some databases put Cohesity's venture funding at $955 million, a total that counts this tender as a round.

Cohesity filed confidentially for a US IPO in December 2021. The plan was shelved when software stocks fell in 2022, and Sanjay Poonen, a former VMware and SAP executive, took over as CEO that August.

Nvidia invested in March 2024, as Cohesity built its Gaia AI search product on Nvidia's software. IBM followed in April and completed the Series F. Neither company disclosed its amount, and the $150 million round size comes from funding databases rather than Cohesity.

The bigger move came in February 2024, when Cohesity agreed to combine with the enterprise data protection business of Veritas, owned by The Carlyle Group since 2016. Reuters reported the unit was valued at over $3 billion including debt, and the deal closed on December 10, 2024.

The financing had three layers, and only two of them brought in cash:

Instead of listing, Cohesity ran a second employee tender in April 2025, organized by BofA Securities and Nasdaq Private Market. The Information reported it at about an $8 billion valuation. Like the 2021 sale, it gave employees cash without raising new money, and no primary round has been reported since.

Cohesity's valuation more than tripled between 2018 and 2021, then stayed flat for three years. The next big jump came from buying Veritas rather than from a higher price per share.

The Series E priced Cohesity at about 2.3 times its Series D value, less than two years later. The 2021 tender added another $1.2 billion in under a year, a rise of about 50%, and Cohesity pointed to that gain in its own announcement.

The Series F did not test that number in public. Cohesity declined to give a valuation, and Forge Global's estimate, based on the share price, sits slightly below the 2021 mark. Forge's data list the same $15.66 share price for the Series F and the Series H, which suggests the jump to over $7 billion came from the shares issued for Veritas, not from investors paying more per share.

Cohesity has said the $7 billion price was set in February 2024 and does not reflect the higher multiples that rivals Rubrik and Commvault later earned in public markets. The April 2025 tender priced the company about 14% higher. The deal also changed how Cohesity's ownership is split, and S&P expected Carlyle to hold about 20% after closing.

Younger data security companies have raised at higher marks. Cyera, founded in 2021, reached a $12 billion valuation in June 2026 after a fast run of funding rounds, above any price Cohesity has been given. Cohesity's own benchmark is Rubrik, which went public in April 2024 and was worth about $17 billion when Poonen told CNBC in September 2025 that he wanted a comparable or higher price.

Cohesity's cap table holds three kinds of investors: the venture firms that funded it from the start, the tech companies that invested and then sold or built on its software, and the private equity investors who came in with Veritas.

Sequoia and Wing led the Series A and are still on the cap table. Wing co-founder Gaurav Garg chairs the board, and Sequoia's Carl Eschenbach and Bill Coughran sit in as board observers. Sequoia also co-led the Series C and joined the Series D and E.

Foundation Capital, Accel, Battery Ventures, Trinity Ventures, and ARTIS Ventures filled out the early rounds. DFJ Growth, Greenspring Associates, and Baillie Gifford joined at the Series E, and Premji Invest, the family office of Wipro founder Azim Premji, bought in through the 2021 tender and added to its holding in 2024.

SoftBank's first Vision Fund led the Series D, returned for the Series E, and backed the Veritas deal. It holds a board observer seat through Vikas Parekh, and its own decisions trace back to SoftBank's founder-controlled structure under Masayoshi Son. Its stake has not been disclosed.

Cohesity's corporate investors are also its partners. Cisco and HPE invested in the Series C and again in the Series D, and HPE packages Cohesity's software with its own systems. Qualcomm Ventures co-led the Series B, and GV, Alphabet's venture arm, co-led the Series C.

Amazon invested in 2020 alongside an AWS partnership, putting Cohesity next to the cloud unit that produces most of Amazon's operating profit. Google's tie deepened in December 2025 with a multi-year partnership that put Gemini models inside Gaia and runs Cohesity's FortKnox vault on Google Cloud, part of Google's business beyond search ads. No new Google investment was disclosed.

Nvidia and IBM arrived in 2024. Gaia runs on Nvidia AI Enterprise and NIM microservices, software that helps sell Nvidia's data center chips, and Nvidia's head of corporate development holds a board observer seat.

IBM resells Cohesity's software under its own name as IBM Storage Defender, an exclusive OEM deal. Poonen said in October 2026 that the two companies are also working on quantum-resistant encryption.

Haveli Investments led the Series H and provided most of its equity. Brian Sheth joined the board, and the closing release named Haveli one of Cohesity's largest shareholders. Coatue, Sapphire Ventures, Dragon Fund, and Madrona invested alongside it.

Carlyle became a shareholder by trading Veritas's data protection business for stock. S&P expected its stake to be about 20%, the largest single holding. Carlyle's Patrick McCarter and former Veritas CEO Greg Hughes now sit on the board, and the rest of Veritas became Arctera, which Cloud Software Group agreed to buy in August 2025.

Cohesity's funding paid for two things: building a platform for a decade, and then buying the market's largest installed base of backup customers. The second bill is still being paid, through interest on the term loan.

The venture money went into engineering and sales. The Series E release named research and development, international expansion, and partner alliances as the uses. Cohesity also made a small acquisition in 2019, buying Imanis Data to back up NoSQL and Hadoop databases.

The Veritas deal was the largest use of capital in Cohesity's history. It brought NetBackup, a backup product found in thousands of large enterprises, and a profitable business growing about 5% a year, according to RBC, next to a Cohesity that was growing at just under 30%. Pro forma for the fiscal year to July 2024, the combined company had over $1.7 billion of revenue and a 28% adjusted cash EBITDA margin.

The deal also brought customers Cohesity did not have. CFO Eric Brown told TechCrunch the two companies shared fewer than 5% of their customers. In October 2025 Cohesity bought Stone Ram, a UK software company, to help move NetBackup users onto its newer DataProtect platform.

The term loan pays SOFR plus 4%, according to lender filings, and S&P expected leverage of about six times adjusted earnings at the end of fiscal 2025, falling to about 4.3 times in fiscal 2026. That debt is the main difference between Cohesity and a typical venture-backed company. Cash flow now has to cover interest and roughly $28 million a year of required repayments before it funds growth.

The plan relies on cost cuts and cash generation. S&P's report cited $200 million of planned cost savings over 18 months, and The Information reported in 2025 that Cohesity was profitable on a free cash flow basis. Poonen said in October 2026 that the company is now profitable, though it publishes no audited results.

The rest goes to product and sales. Cohesity moved from one on-premises software release a year to four, built Gaia and its RecoveryAgent tools, and launched Agent Resilience in September 2026 to back up the systems behind AI agents. Its Gaia Catalog, in early access, publishes backup data into Databricks and Microsoft Fabric, the analytics platforms behind Databricks' $190 billion valuation and Microsoft's data business.

On sales, Brown told William Blair that Cohesity first focused on keeping Veritas renewals, then shifted sales pay toward new business in the first half of fiscal 2026. The second half added sales staff and incentives to move NetBackup customers onto Cohesity's own platform.

Cohesity's growth push targets the Global 2000 in five industries: banks, the public sector, healthcare, telecom, and tech. It is also selling through managed service providers, offering sovereign and on-premises versions for European buyers, and courting companies moving off VMware. Poonen said in October 2026 that Cohesity expects to reach $2 billion of annual recurring revenue soon, up from $1.5 billion at the close of the Veritas deal.

The product plan centers on AI. Gaia, the Maestro layer that lets outside AI agents query Cohesity, and Agent Resilience, due for general availability by the end of 2026, all aim to turn stored backups into data that companies can search and use.

The IPO is the next financing step. Poonen told CNBC in September 2025 that 2026 would be the year if the business kept performing, once Cohesity had a full fiscal year of combined results, and in October 2026 he called a listing "on the horizon" without giving a date. No public S-1 or new confidential filing has been reported.

The risks come from the balance sheet and the competition. A B-rated term loan leaves less room for error than an equity-funded rival has, and S&P noted that the investor group plans to exit through an IPO. Rubrik has a public valuation more than twice Cohesity's last mark, Veeam and Commvault compete for the same customers, and Brown has said rivals won Veritas customers during the long wait for the deal to close. The $2.8 billion loan bought Cohesity its market share, and an IPO priced near Rubrik would show whether that bet paid off.

Cohesity has raised about $1.8 billion of equity: $810 million across its Series A to F from 2013 to 2024, plus a Series H in December 2024 that Reuters reported at about $1 billion. It also took on a $2.8 billion term loan to fund the Veritas deal, which brings total funding to about $4.6 billion. Two employee tender offers, in 2021 and 2025, paid shareholders rather than the company.

Cohesity's lead investors include Haveli Investments, Sequoia Capital, Wing Venture Capital, SoftBank Vision Fund, GV, DFJ Growth, and Foundation Capital. Its strategic investors are Nvidia, IBM, Amazon, Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Qualcomm. The Carlyle Group became a large shareholder through the Veritas deal, and Coatue, Sapphire Ventures, Premji Invest, Baillie Gifford, and Madrona are also backers.

Cohesity was valued at over $7 billion when its combination with Veritas closed in December 2024. An employee tender in April 2025 was reported at about $8 billion. Before the deal, its highest mark was $3.7 billion, set in a 2021 tender.

No. Cohesity is private. It filed confidentially for a US IPO in December 2021 but shelved the plan, and CEO Sanjay Poonen has said a listing is on the horizon without giving a date. No new filing had been reported by October 2026.

Cohesity is owned by its investors, employees, and founder. The Carlyle Group is the largest single holder, with a stake S&P put at about 20%, and Haveli Investments is one of the largest. Sequoia, Wing, SoftBank Vision Fund, Premji Invest, and Nvidia also hold stakes, and founder Mohit Aron is now Founder Emeritus.