Cohesity: CEO History

Cohesity, Inc. is a premier global titan in AI-powered data security and cyber resilience headquartered in San Jose, California. Founded in June 2013 by distributed systems pioneer Mohit Aron (who previously co-founded Nutanix and built Google's core file system), Cohesity solved one of enterprise IT's most complex challenges: mass data fragmentation. Across global corporations, secondary data—including backups, disaster recovery replicas, file shares, object stores, and analytical test data—was historically trapped in isolated silos managed by disparate point solutions. Cohesity engineered a revolutionary web-scale architecture that consolidates all secondary data onto a single, software-defined platform: the Cohesity Data Cloud. Operating across hybrid on-premises environments and all major public clouds, Cohesity protects critical enterprise data against catastrophic ransomware attacks, providing zero-trust isolation, continuous behavioral anomaly detection, and rapid instant mass recovery. In February 2024, Cohesity announced the transformative acquisition of Veritas's enterprise data protection business in a landmark transaction valuing the combined company at over $11 billion. Led by President and Chief Executive Officer Sanjay Poonen (former COO of VMware and President of SAP), Cohesity serves more than 10,000 enterprise customers, including nearly half of the Fortune 100, generating hundreds of millions in high-margin recurring software subscriptions.

Cohesity operates a high-growth software and SaaS subscription business model with strong annual recurring revenue (ARR) visibility and high enterprise expansion rates: (1) Cohesity Data Cloud Software Subscriptions (~75% of revenue), billed annually on a capacity or workload basis, providing automated backup, instant mass recovery, disaster recovery orchestration, and file/object services across hybrid clouds; (2) Cohesity Cloud Services SaaS (~15% of revenue), fully managed Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) and Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) hosted on AWS and Microsoft Azure; and (3) Advanced AI & Security Add-Ons (~10% of revenue), which monetizes Cohesity FortKnox (isolated cyber vaulting SaaS), Cohesity Turing (generative AI search and risk analytics), and Cohesity DataHawk (threat intelligence and data classification). Following the Veritas transaction, Cohesity's combined enterprise platform manages hundreds of exabytes of data across more than 10,000 corporate customers.