"SoftBank is in talks to invest in data storage company Cohesity at a $1 billion valuation"

Storage is the unheralded tech at the very core of all the IoT, smart-city, vehicle-to-infrastructure-databases stuff that the technocratic world seems to be headed toward. As noted in "UPDATED—NVIDIA Wants to Be the Brains Behind the Surveillance State (NVDA)" we're starting to see GPU-accelerated, water-cooled storage and retrieval systems arrive on the scene.

And from Recode, April 13, a slightly different angle:

The five-year-old company is led by prominent CEO Mohit Aron.

SoftBank’s Vision Fund is in late talks to fund a hot data-storage company, Cohesity, in a deal that would value the company at about $1 billion.

Investors would place at least $150 million into the company, people familiar with the matter say, in what would be the latest romp on a deal spree by the massive technology investing firm. The Vision Fund-led round is still in the process of closing, the people said, and the numbers could change slightly.

Cohesity would be valued in the ballpark of $900 million before the new money.

The Vision Fund declined to comment. Cohesity did not respond to requests for comment.

The five-year-old company is led by prominent CEO Mohit Aron, who previously co-founded a different enterprise software company, Nutanix, that went public in late 2016. Aron has raised about $160 million for his company from investors like Sequoia Capital, Wing Ventures and Google Ventures. It was last valued at $470 million a year ago, before the cash, according to PitchBook.

The funding is a sign of momentum for Cohesity, which is competing against legacy players like Dell EMC and CommVault in addition to other startups.

Often compared to Rubrik, another similar-stage, similarly aged venture-backed data company, Cohesity offers “secondary storage” capabilities to its customers, such as Harris Teeter or Tribune Media. Cohesity sells its platform which tries to protect and upload backup data to the cloud....MORE