Cohesity today announced a $150 million Series F funding round, backed by heavyweight strategic investors IBM and Nvidia. The data security and management vendor also expanded its partnership with IBM for enhanced cyber resilience capabilities across hybrid cloud environments.

Before the Series F round, Cohesity had raised a total of $805 million in funding over seven rounds. The most recent round was led by Nvidia on March 18, 2024. The startup raised $250 million in a Series E funding round led by DFJ Growth, Foundation Capital, Greenspring Associates, and Wing Venture Capital on April 9, 2020.

IBM joined Nvidia as a strategic investor for Cohesity’s Series F financing round. The funding was announced on the heels of Cohesity’s acquisition of the data protection business of Veritas.

The deal, unanimously approved by both Cohesity’s and Veritas’ boards of directors, is expected to close by the end of 2024, subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions. The combined company is valued at approximately $7 billion and aims to increase its share of a growing $30 billion market.

Cohesity’s current marquee investors, including Softbank Vision Fund, Sequoia Capital, Wing Venture Capital, and Premji Invest, will continue to support the combined entity. Existing Veritas shareholders, including majority owner Carlyle, will become shareholders in Cohesity after the close of the transaction.

Cohesity collaborates with IBM for cyber resilience

On top of the investment, IBM integrated Cohesity capabilities with its cyber resilience platform to strengthen the joint customers’ ability to recover from data breaches and cyberattacks.

“IBM is a powerful partner in the enterprise cloud and IT infrastructure market. They bring decades of expertise to our relationship, in addition to their investment in our business to help fund incremental research and development to offer customers even stronger cyber resilience,” said Cohesity CEO and president Sanjay Poonen in a statement.

The most recent "Cost of a Data Breach" report from IBM Security highlights a staggering global average cost of $4.45 million per breach in 2023, marking a 15% upsurge over the last three years.

To address this issue, the partnership brings together Cohesity DataProtect with IBM’s Storage Defender Solution to help their joint customers protect, monitor, manage, and recover data.

Cohesity DataProtect is a secured backup and recovery multicloud platform, designed to safeguard users’ data against sophisticated cyber threats and offers comprehensive policy-based protection for their cloud-native, software-as-a-service (SaaS), and traditional data sources and deployed on-premises or consumed as a service.

Launched last June, IBM Storage Defender is a multitier service for cyber resilience, designed to help enterprises protect and defend data against threats such as ransomware across on-premises and cloud environments. The service integrates data protection from Cohesity, alongside the IBM Storage Protect backup technology.

“IBM Storage Defender is designed to leverage sensors across primary and secondary workloads to detect threats and anomalies from backup metadata, array snapshots, and other relevant threat indicators,” Sam Werner, VP of IBM storage product management, told SDxCentral in an earlier interview. “This allows clients to cut through data silos and get a clear action plan on what it takes to strengthen their data resilience.”