Indian founder rocks Silicon Valley with hottest startup

Cohesity Inc, a startup that specializes in data storage, led by Mohit Aron, an Indian founder secured funding that raised the company’s valuation over $500 million, boosting its prospects majorly, a person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg.

“The new infusion will help the startup expand internationally while also improving its lineup with more engineers,” said Aron. The startup received fresh round of funding of over $90 million by GV—the venture capital arm of Google parent Alphabet Inc.---and Sequoia Capital. That’s the third major funding round for Cohesity, bringing the total investments in the company to more than $160 million, according to Bloomberg.

Cohesity is expanding its reach to attract more businesses looking for new ways to handle the growing reams of data being produced every day. While the company doesn't disclose sales, the startup said it has been roughly doubling the number of customers every quarter. Its products became publicly available in late 2015."There's a lot of market demand," Bill Coughran, a partner at Sequoia Capital and a Cohesity board member told Bloomberg.

GV participated in an earlier funding round and Sequoia co-led Cohesity's initial funding. New participants included Cisco Systems Inc., Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. and Foundation Capital. Among the other investors are Accel, Battery Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures.

Aron declined to comment on the funding round's valuation. He founded Cohesity in 2013 and previously was a co-founder of Nutanix Inc., another storage company, which went public last year and now has valuation of about $2.6 billion. He said the funding announced Tuesday will help the startup as it attracts corporate customers, which include Shutterstock and Ultimate Software.

"We're seeing this big uptake," Aron said. The funding "means that I can kind of press on the gas a little bit."

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-04/storage-startup-attracts-new-funding-at-valuation-of-more-than-500-million