Cohesity founder and CEO Mohit Aron. image: Cohesity

Data storage company Cohesity has announced $250 million in fresh funding that values the seven-year-old company at $2.5 billion and brings its total funding since inception to more than $650 million. The new funding, precisely a Series E, was co-led by DFJ Growth, Foundation Capital, Greenspring Associates, and Wing Venture Capital. The likes of Sequoia Capital, SoftBank Vision Fund 1, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cisco Investments, Baillie Gifford, and Sozo Ventures also participated.

Cohesity says it’ll double down on research and development as well as marketing and sales efforts with the new funding. The San Jose-based company says it recorded a 150% increase in recurring revenue in the first half of its fiscal 2020 (August 2019 – January 2020 in this case) compared to the same period in fiscal 2019. During the same period, Cohesity says it doubled its number of customers.

Cohesity offers data management services for enterprises. Its focus lies on “secondary” data, which is, critical data such as backups, archives, file shares and analytics that is not conventionally required on the go. Cohesity offers a hypothetically cheaper and efficient way to store such data, as that kind of data is in many cases hard to protect, expensive to manage, and difficult to analyze.

“Closing a major funding round during these times of economic uncertainty is testament to the promise that our investors see in Cohesity,” Cohesity founder and CEO Mohit Aron said in a press statement, the ”economic uncertainty” referring to a global market cooldown stemming from the coronavirus outbreak. “More enterprises globally are abandoning legacy offerings in favor of our modern, software-defined approach to data management that is incredibly simple to use — critical during these challenging times as customers are looking to reduce total cost of ownership while enabling remote IT teams.”

Before founding Cohesity, Aron previously co-founded and held the position of CTO at Nutanix, a multi-billion dollar data storage company. Nutanix, which was founded in 2009, was originally a hardware-centric storage company before pivoting to a software-centric and cloud-based model a few years ago in the middle of a market-wide shift from on-premise enterprise storage to cloud storage. Cohesity has also gone through a similar pivot, having completed a transition to a full software-based business model since its last funding round. Cohesity’s last funding round was fortuitously also a $250 million investment, one that was led by the SoftBank Vision Fund.

“We are excited to partner with Cohesity because they are attacking a huge market and are simply the best at what they do. They are reinventing data management with extraordinary solutions and a vision for the future that is unlike any other company in the market today,” DFJ Growth partner Randy Glein touted in a press statement.

“Cohesity has successfully transitioned to a software business model, secured outstanding partners globally, built deep OEM relationships with top technology companies, and is managing data for some of the largest enterprises in the world. We are excited to be a part of Cohesity’s journey and look forward to helping the company, and its world-class team, scale into the category-defining company built to last.” Glein said.