Drinks are on Cohesity, which has been handed $250m from investors

Secondary storage converger Cohesity has raised $250m in D-round funding.

This follows a $90m C-round last year, taking the total raised, since it was founded in 2013, to $410m. The firm has bragged that this outpaces all other Series D enterprise software investments in the US over the last 18 months.

The investors were led by the SoftBank Vision Fund, with strong participation from Cisco Investments, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital. Cash also came in from early investor Sequoia Capital, ARTIS Ventures, Battery Ventures, Trinity Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Wing Venture Capital and others.

HPE offers products built with Cohesity's DataPlatform software.

We're told over 200 new enterprise customers bought Cohesity products in the last two quarters. It claimed its annual revenues rose 600 per cent from 2016 to 2017.

The firm will use the cash for large-scale global expansion. CEO and founder Mohit Aron said: "Cohesity has built significant momentum and market share during the last 12 months and we are just getting started."

In the storage startup world, rival Rubrik has raised, we believe, at least $292m. Druva is at $198m, Kaminario at $218m, Qumulo has raised more than $223m, Pivot3 is on $247m, while data-warehouser-in-the-cloud Snowflake has raised $473m.

Box raised $564m before its IPO in 2015, Pure Storage $470m, while Nutanix IPO'd in 2016 after raising $312.6m. Tintri went public in 2017 after raising $260m.

All of this suggests that this might be Cohesity's pre-IPO round. Give it 12 months more of growing fast, if it can, and then we might see an IPO in the second half of 2019 or 2020.

Aron blogged about the new round here. ®