Cohesity has completed a $250m series E round that values the data management startup at $2.5bn.
Mohit Aron, CEO and founder, said today in a press release: “Closing a major funding round during these times of economic uncertainty is testament to the promise that our investors see in Cohesity.
“More enterprises globally are abandoning legacy offerings in favour of our modern, software-defined approach to data management … critical during these challenging times as customers are looking to reduce total cost of ownership while enabling remote IT teams.”
Cohesity will use the new cash to boost research and development, expand its presence in the USA, EMEA and APAC, and to build reseller and partnership channels.
Total funding stands at $660m and its valuation has more than doubled from the $1.1.bn set in a previous funding round in June 2018. Rubrik, Cohesity’s arch-rival, has taken in about $550m in its funding rounds.
How many customers?
Cohesity said today that it doubled customer count from the first half of fiscal 2019 ended January 31 2019 to the first half of 2020. Also it has doubled the volume of customer data under management during the same time. The company claims a 150 per cent increase in recurring revenue as it has moved to a software-led business model. But it has not provided any numbers.
Cohesity frequently changes the way it announces customers numbers, making it harder for others to calculate growth. For instance, in January 2017 the company said its customer count had passed 80 and in January 2018 it said the count had doubled over the past eight months. In August 2018 it stated its customer count had quadrupled in its fiscal year ended July 31 2018. It reported more than 100 customers in EMEA by November 2018.
In October 2019 Cohesity announced another doubling in customers for the fiscal 2019 year ending July 31. Now it says customers have doubled from January 2019 to January 2020.
So we can do some rough estimates, using those 80 customers in January 2017 as our starting point:
- Jan 2017 – 80+ customers
- Jan 2018 – customer count doubled over past eight months, meaning at least 160.
- Aug 2018 – 4x increase in fiscal 2018 means at least 320 customers (compared with Jan 2017)
- Oct 2019 – Customer count doubled in fiscal 2019 – meaning at least 640 customers.
- Jan 31 2020 – 100 per cent y/y increase means at least 640 customers and possibly upwards of 1,000
Our sense is that Cohesity has surpassed 1,000 customers, and probably many more than that. Next thing is to try to figure out average customer spend…
