Cohesity History: Founding, Growth & Key Milestones

The vision for Cohesity was born from Mohit Aron's pioneering work in distributed computing. As a lead engineer at Google in the early 2000s, Aron helped build the Google File System (GFS), which proved that commodity hardware could be aggregated into an infinitely scalable, resilient computing cluster. In 2009, Aron co-founded Nutanix, pioneering hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) to simplify primary compute and storage. In 2013, Aron realized that while primary storage had been modernized, secondary data (representing more than 80% of all corporate data volume) remained locked in fragmented, inefficient silos across tape libraries, target deduplication appliances, and legacy backup software. Aron founded Cohesity in San Jose, California, raising $15 million in Series A funding from Sequoia Capital. Over two years of intensive engineering, Aron's team built SpanFS—a ground-up distributed file system designed to scale linearly to exabytes while delivering strict consistency, global deduplication, and instant virtual machine mounting. In 2015, Cohesity launched its first commercial platform, DataPlatform, rapidly winning enterprise customer deployments across healthcare, financial services, and government sectors. In April 2022, Cohesity appointed enterprise software luminary Sanjay Poonen as CEO, while Mohit Aron transitioned to Chief Technology and Product Officer. In February 2024, Poonen orchestrated the historic merger with Veritas's data protection division, uniting Veritas's deep Global 2000 customer relationships with Cohesity's modern cloud-native architecture.