US-based data management software provider Cohesity received $250m in a series E round which included three corporate investors – telecoms conglomerate SoftBank, electronics manufacturer and IT service provider Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) as well as networking technology producer Cisco. SoftBank took part through its SoftBank Vision Fund I, while Cisco participated via its Cisco Investments subsidiary. The round valued the company at $2.5bn and also featured other VC investors – DFJ Growth, Foundation Capital, Greenspring Associates and Wing Venture Capital (the latter three co-leading it) in addition to Baillie Gifford, Sequoia Capital and Sozo Ventures.
Founded in 2013, Cohesity has created a software platform which organises big quantities of organisations’ data in order to prevent the fragmentation that can take place with large amounts of diverse information. Customers can also purchase specialised applications from Cohesity’s marketplace.
The deal is one of the latest in the broader big data tech space, which had expectedly attracted much attention from corporate investors in the past decade due to an overall digitisation in nearly every sector, as our GCV Analytics bar chart clearly shows. From 2014 onward, there have been at least 130 such corporate-backed rounds every year, though the peak in both deals (204) and total estimated dollars in them ($7.98bn) was reached in 2015.
