Cohesity closed a $250 million Series D funding round led by the SoftBank Vision Fund with continued investment from Cisco Investments, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital.

This brings the secondary storage and data management company’s total funding to $410 million. Cohesity says this outpaces all other Series D enterprise software investments in the U.S. over the last 18 months.

Does this mean it’s initial public offering (IPO) time for the 5-year-old company whose CEO Mohit Aron also co-founded Nutanix?

“Who knows what the future holds," said Lynn Lucas, the company’s chief marketing officer.

Aron said something similar on Twitter last November. “We’re focused on delivering long-term value to our shareholders,” he tweeted. “An IPO is just a funding round along the way."

Cohesity will use the funding to push its global expansion and pump more research and development dollars into its software-defined storage platform.

Companies use on-premises and cloud storage for secondary workloads, which makes up 80 percent of enterprises’ storage needs, according to Cohesity. This data is siloed and it’s expensive to store. It also leads to a $60-billion-per-year problem, the company claims.

“This is a really massive $60 billion-a-year market,” Lucas said. “We are disrupting what we call the secondary data and applications market. This is backup and recovery, files and objects, and also analytics and test-dev. Each of those areas are supported by siloed solutions.”

She compared these siloed solutions to pre-smartphone days. Back then, you’d need to carry a camera, a flashlight, a GPS device, and a music player in addition to the phone itself. “Cohesity is doing to secondary data and applications what the smartphone did to the consumer market,” Lucas explained. “We believe everything in those siloes should move to one solution.”

In February, the company added file and object storage support allowing customers to consolidate structured and unstructured data onto one, scale-out platform. And in April, it added a feature called CloudSpin. This allows companies to instantly access their backup data in the cloud for testing and development purposes.

“Digital transformation is top of mind for boards and CEOs,” Lucas said. “But the ability for the CIO to know what data they have, where it can be moved because of new compliance regulations, and how they can get data and applications to the cloud is still a challenge. Cohesity is focused on making that secondary data and applications management and movement seamless, spanning the core data center and the public cloud. We’re going to continue to allow data to innovate to become more productive for our customers.”

Gartner forecasts that more than 80 percent of enterprise data will be stored in scale-out storage systems in enterprise and cloud data centers by 2021, up from 30 percent in 2017.

Largely because of this, both Cohesity and its primary competitor, Rubrik, have seen explosive revenue growth over the past year and made several updates to their software-defined storage platforms.

Cohesity differentiates itself from Rubrik by “looking at this whole secondary market landscape,” Lucas said. “We provide a new, web-scale solution for backup but we go beyond backup to incorporate file and object, test and dev, and analytics. It’s not just a better backup solution. Mohit, like he did at Nutanix in revolutionizing the primary [storage] space, he’s taken the same approach here and looked at how do we revolutionize the entire secondary space.”