Sanjay Poonen0:22
He said something that really resonated with me, which is: you've done the big company stuff. You know, 20 billion, 10 to 20 billion at SAP, 6 to 12 billion at VMware. You haven't taken a small company and made it big, so you should try that. And for me, it was a little bit of like, can we take something that was small and make it an iconic company? SAP and VMware were already iconic when I got there, and we of course made it even better. And that's what I saw as the opportunity of Cohesity. It was a world-class company, about 300 million when I joined, with fantastic technology, an incredible founder, technology that was the best. In fact, many of the customers told me it was the best tech they had seen since VMware. So there was no tech risk there. We needed to scale the go-to-market to get it to be a multi-billion space. We were number seven. So I saw a tremendous opportunity at the center of this notion of data security because of ransomware attacks and all the pressure on data to create a leader, and that's what we're off doing today.
The entire product is based on notions of machine learning and AI before generative AI. The founders were ex-Google folks who built a lot of key capabilities of ML and AI into the product because a lot of these cybersecurity data detection of entropy and anomaly detection are AI algorithms. So that was from the get-go built to be a key part to the proposition of the product. By the generative AI, we started working with Nvidia. Nvidia made one investment in this space. They looked at all the tech companies and picked us to do an equity investment because we cracked an important problem of how you could use retrieval augmented generation, also known as RAG, directly on secondary and backup data. We invented that. We in fact patented the idea. Nvidia loved it, and we were featured at GTC in both 2024 and 2025. Jensen's words were: Cohesity backs up the world's data, and they're building their RAG application called Gaia on top of Nvidia platform. We're working with them and Google and Microsoft and Amazon, who are also those four companies I think pioneers in what the world of AI is going to look like. And you can imagine a problem like this where hundreds of millions of PDF documents sit in our backup. You can easily query that, summarize it, get insights into it, sort of like flying a flashing a torchlight right into your data. That is going to be a tremendous advantage to not just keeping the data secure but also getting insights into it.
Today the number one problem is data resilience. People's data is under attack from nation-state actors, cyber criminals, and we work with 13,000 customers, the largest of the largest, 85% of the Fortune 100, 70% of the Global 500. So the name brand in financial services, tech, telco, healthcare, you know, you name it, public sector are our customers. So their number one priority is keeping their data safe from ransomware attacks. And we've designed something that's got the fastest cyber recovery and enormous amount of advanced security. Now what they want to be able to do is let's take that a step further and using AI tools get insight into that data. And we have a very good sort of two-pronged engine approach to how we approach our company's ambitions. Number one, we innovate to be the best product in the industry, and that's been always the pride of Cohesity. I hope and we will continue to do that. Number two, we obsess about our customers. We get an anchor customer, a particular vertical, we study their needs, we drive what they need, and then every customer of that vertical becomes automatically like that anchor customer. You pick the largest bank, make them successful. Pick the public sector agency in the federal, the biggest telco, the biggest tech company, the biggest hospital. And when you do that, you can repeat that. That's the playbook I learned at SAP and at VMware, and now you get to apply it at a smaller company. We've gone from 300 million now with this major acquisition we've done of Veritas, now on the path to being a $2 billion company and the biggest in our space, number one, but enormous amount of innovation, and we're pouring a lot of engineering including into our exciting new work we're doing with Nutanix, which I'm very excited about.
