Cohesity launches India operations- appoints Apurv Gupta as head of Cohesity India

Cohesity, a converged secondary storage player, announced the launch of the company’s India operations and also announced the appointment of Google-alum Apurv Gupta as the Head of Engineering for Cohesity India. The company emerged recently from stealth mode with $70 million in venture funding, which it is using to create an infinitely scalable data storage solution that converges all secondary storage workflows for data protection, development, and analytics onto a single, intelligent platform.

Cohesity closed a Series A round of $15 million led by Sequoia Capital and Wing Venture Capital in late 2013, followed up last month by a $55 million Series B investment round led by ARTIS Ventures and Qualcomm Incorporated, through its venture investment group, Qualcomm Ventures, with additional investment from Accel Partners, Battery Ventures, Google Ventures, and Trinity Ventures.

The company believes that the Cohesity Data Platform will eliminate the current fragmentation and data sprawl in secondary storage by leveraging a Google-like, web-scale architecture to converge these data silos for data protection, development, and analytics onto a single, intelligent platform that empowers businesses to simultaneously manage, protect, and learn from their data. While purpose-built primary storage make sense for critical production applications, Cohesity’s solution is designed to help businesses realize enormous efficiencies across secondary storage by alleviating the costly management overhead of using separate products and eliminating redundant data copies across these silos.

Cohesity was founded in June 2013 by CEO Mohit Aron, who pioneered the concept of hyper-convergence, the first architecture to converge compute and storage to simplify virtualization. Aron founded the infrastructure company Nutanix to bring hyper-convergence to market and served as its CTO before leaving to build Cohesity.

“After converging compute and storage at Nutanix for virtualized applications in the primary storage landscape, I still felt that there was a lot of fragmentation and overspend where the larger bulk of the data sits — in secondary storage,” Aron said. “Point solutions like data deduplication, copy data management and integrated backup appliances act as Band-Aids, but only by bringing the data together in one place can customers manage it truly efficiently and start to derive valuable business insight from this dark data. Secondary storage makes up over 80 percent of an organization’s data — it’s where the majority of data goes to die today, so it’s exactly the right place to run data analytics, transforming the value of this previously passive data.”

Cohesity India Head, Apurv Gupta elaborates, “In addition to the engineering talent pool, India’s enterprise storage Market has rapidly grown over the past decade and is ripe for disruption. Cohesity’s converged approach will simplify manageability and dramatically improve insight into the data being stored. We see huge potential for Cohesity in this geography and I’m excited to be leading this effort as we ramp our presence here.”

“We believe Cohesity’s web-scale experience and converged architecture approach is uniquely positioned to radically simplify how customers protect and use their data — an opportunity which IDC estimates at nearly $50 billion this year,” said ARTIS Ventures General Partner and Founder Stuart Peterson. “We see an even larger opportunity for the volume and complexity of data in secondary storage environments.”

“Primary storage has seen major disruption the last few years, but in secondary storage, there’s only been a few point innovations,” said Charles Curran, senior director, Qualcomm Ventures. “The Cohesity team is uniquely experienced to bring their Google File System knowledge to remake this complex and fractured secondary storage landscape.”

The additional funding will help Cohesity scale its engineering, sales, and marketing teams to ramp up ahead of the general release of the Cohesity Data Platform. Sequoia Capital Partner Bill Coughran and Wing Venture Capital Founding Partner Gaurav Garg joined Cohesity’s board of directors at the time of the Series A funding round to guide the company through rapid growth. “Mohit’s vision for transforming secondary storage workflows is incredibly powerful,” Garg said. “We are excited by Cohesity’s plans to help firms simultaneously manage, store, and learn from their data.”