Cohesity is a data security and management company that became one of the largest players in the space following its 2024 merger with the Veritas data protection business. The combined entity delivers a comprehensive platform for data protection, backup, recovery, and cyber resilience across enterprise, cloud, and edge environments. Founded in 2013 by Mohit Aron, co-founder of Nutanix and a widely recognized pioneer in hyperconverged infrastructure, Cohesity was built to consolidate mass data fragmentation across secondary storage silos into a single, software-defined platform.
Cohesity Data Cloud
Data Protection and Backup
Cohesity’s core platform unifies backup, continuous data protection, and disaster recovery across on-premises, cloud, and SaaS workloads. The platform eliminates legacy backup infrastructure by consolidating point products into a single software-defined solution with a web-scale, distributed file system architecture. Policy-based automation enables organizations to define SLA-driven protection for thousands of workloads from a single management console.
Cyber Resilience and Ransomware Recovery
The platform provides immutable backup snapshots stored in an append-only architecture that cannot be modified or deleted by ransomware. DataHawk integrates threat scanning, data classification, and cyber vaulting to ensure organizations can recover from ransomware with confidence that restored data is clean. ML-based anomaly detection identifies encryption events, mass deletion, and other indicators of ransomware activity across backup data streams. Clean room recovery capabilities allow organizations to stand up isolated recovery environments for forensic investigation before restoring to production.
AI Workload Protection
Cohesity Gaia is an AI-powered conversational search assistant that allows users to query backup data using natural language, leveraging retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to extract insights from protected datasets. The platform also protects AI workloads and data pipelines, ensuring that training data, model artifacts, and vector databases are backed up and recoverable.
Data Governance and Compliance
Automated data classification, eDiscovery, and compliance workflows enable organizations to locate sensitive data including PII, PHI, and PCI across their backup footprint and apply retention policies consistently. The platform supports legal hold, automated data retirement, and compliance reporting for regulatory frameworks including GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA.
Threat Intelligence and Security Integration
Cohesity integrates with leading SIEM and SOAR platforms, feeding backup anomaly alerts into security operations workflows. The platform also supports YARA rules and third-party threat intelligence feeds to scan backup data for known malware indicators before recovery.
Disaster Recovery
Built-in disaster recovery orchestration allows organizations to failover workloads to a secondary site or cloud region with automated runbook execution. DR testing can be performed non-disruptively on a scheduled basis, with documented results for compliance auditing. Cohesity supports both site-to-site replication and cloud-based DR targets.
FortKnox Cyber Vaulting
Cohesity FortKnox provides a SaaS-based cyber vault, an isolated, air-gapped copy of backup data stored in Cohesity-managed cloud infrastructure. This third copy of data is protected from ransomware even if the primary and secondary backup environments are compromised, providing a last line of defense for critical data recovery.
Veritas Merger
In 2024, Cohesity completed its transformative merger with the Veritas data protection business, creating one of the largest data management companies globally. The combination added Veritas’s massive installed base of enterprise backup customers spanning decades of deployments, along with its NetBackup, Backup Exec, and Alta product lines. The merged entity serves tens of thousands of customers, including a significant majority of Fortune 100 companies, and manages exabytes of protected data worldwide. The integration roadmap focuses on bringing Cohesity’s modern, cloud-native architecture to the Veritas customer base while preserving backward compatibility with existing deployments.
Platform Coverage
Cohesity protects data across enterprise environments including VMware, Hyper-V, physical servers (Windows, Linux), NAS, and databases such as Oracle, SQL Server, SAP HANA, MongoDB, and Cassandra. Cloud coverage spans AWS, Azure, and GCP including cloud-native workloads and managed databases. SaaS protection covers Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and Google Workspace. The platform also handles edge environments like remote offices, branch locations, and IoT data aggregation points, plus container-native backup and recovery for Kubernetes workloads.
Funding and Ownership
Cohesity raised over $900 million in venture and growth funding prior to the Veritas merger, with key investors including SoftBank Vision Fund, Sequoia Capital, CPPIB (Canada Pension Plan Investment Board), Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Cisco Investments. The Series F round in 2021 valued Cohesity at approximately $3.7 billion. The combined Cohesity-Veritas entity is PE-backed, with significant institutional investor support from the Carlyle Group and other investors that previously backed the Veritas data protection business.
Market Position
The combined Cohesity-Veritas entity competes at the top tier of the data protection market alongside Veeam, Commvault, Dell (PowerProtect), and Rubrik. The merger positioned Cohesity to serve the broadest range of enterprise workloads while accelerating its shift toward security-first data management. Cohesity has been recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup and Recovery.
The company’s growing emphasis on cyber resilience through immutability, anomaly detection, and clean room recovery reflects the convergence of data protection and cybersecurity, a trend reshaping the backup industry. With the Veritas integration, Cohesity now claims the largest data protection installed base globally, serving customers across financial services, healthcare, government, manufacturing, and technology sectors.
Key Verticals
Cohesity serves customers across a wide range of industries. In financial services, banks, insurance companies, and asset managers rely on the platform for immutable data protection meeting regulatory compliance requirements. Healthcare organizations including hospitals and health systems protect electronic health records and medical imaging data. Government customers at federal, state, and local levels have stringent data sovereignty and compliance requirements. Manufacturing customers protect operational technology data and industrial control system backups.
Leadership
Sanjay Poonen serves as CEO, having previously been COO at VMware and President at SAP. Mohit Aron, who co-founded Nutanix before starting Cohesity, remains as Founder and Chief Technology Advisor. Kit Beall is Chief Revenue Officer, Lynn Lucas serves as Chief Marketing Officer, and Craig Martell is Chief Technology Officer.