Sanjay Poonen, CEO of Cohesity, is former COO of VMware and president of SAP.
Scott Mullin | CNBC
The data security company’s united states that it has focused on potential early public offers in 2026, gaining ambitions to achieve a $17 billion peer exchange valuation. Lubrick.
This move marks a significant milestone nvidiaBacked Cohesity CEO Sanjay Poonen said the IPO was planning to first execute the IPO in 2021 to carry out the complex merger.
The agreement made the company the largest data protection software provider, shutting down in December 2024, valuing the total entities at the time to be over $7 billion.
Poonen said the combination is a dangerous but calculated transaction that links his rapidly growing but not-employed companies with larger, highly profitable Veritas.
“We calculated that in 2022 we could be public, but in the middle of all these companies, we’re going to be a little fish,” Poonen told CNBC, referring to competitors, including Rubrik. Commvault. “That’s not what I wanted.”
“We wanted to be the biggest fish, have the largest market share and then we wanted to go public,” he said.
That excellence was achieved when Cohesity, which previously accounted for 5% of the market, won the 14% held by Veritas. According to a study by RBC Capital Markets, the combined entities are currently the market share leader with 19% of highly fragmented industries.
Puhnen shows that he is ready to be made public as soon as he is able to offer the full fiscal year results to public market investors as an entity that combines the full fiscal year results.
The CEO also noted that Cohesity’s fiscal year will end in August. This means the company can wait until the fall of the 2026 IPO.
“If the business is going well, I think 2026 will be the year,” Puhnen added.
Tech Unicorns exit
Compared to last year, 2025 saw a recovery in IPOs and M&A activities for technology companies that exceeded $100 million in 2025. Crunchbase data shows that 25 unicorns have been published or acquired between May 2024 and May 2025, compared to 15 at the same time last year.
However, analysts warned that stock market volatility, caused by macroeconomic factors, such as changes to US tariff policies and lack of stability in interest rate outlook, is likely to pose a hurdle.
“We’ve seen unicorn-scale exit activities through IPOs and M&AS since the beginning of this year… macroeconomic volatility weighs at the exit,” Barclays equity analyst Riah Marine I Sora said in a July note to clients.
“Equal or superior rating”
Cohesity’s rating expectations are benchmarked against Rubrik, which was released in April 2024 and now boasts a market capitalization of around $17 billion.
According to FactSet data, the company currently trades at multiple times (P/sell) of sales starting at a price of 12.75, while the smaller Piercom Ball trades at 7.16 times P/sell.
Poonen argued that Cohesity as a larger entity after the merger should direct “equal or superior ratings” if similar performance metrics can be demonstrated.
“We’re a bigger ship than them,” he said.
The IPO around Rubrik’s rating means that Cohesity’s rating is likely to be more than doubled since its merger with Veritas in 2023. It will lead to a big atrium for early investors such as Sequoia Capital, Wing Venture Capital, Battery Ventures and Accel Partners, as well as late investors such as SoftBank, Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital and Baillie Gifford.
However, Puhnen said the management’s focus is on the company’s beneficial growth. “Our focus is not on the company’s current stock price,” Puhnen explained. Instead, “When you generate long-term customer value and profitable growth, you just get valuations. That happens.”
Cohesity for the year ending in July 2024 had a recurring revenue of $1.5 billion, with an adjusted profit margin of 28%. Before the transaction, Veritas had grown at around 5%, but it had grown to a cohesiveness of less than 30% year-on-year.
Analysts at RBC Capital Markets said the total company is expected to expand to mid-teens.
AI’s impact on cybersecurity
Growth in artificial intelligence can increase the likelihood of an increase in cyberattacks, but AI is also being used to build defense and shield companies from increasingly sophisticated incidents and reduce the costs of attacks. According to IBM’s costs in Data Breach Report 2025, the average cost of data breach fell 9% in 2025 to just over $4.4 million in 2024.
“While the use of AI has helped reduce costs, the inappropriate implementation and use of Shadow AI has introduced significant cybersecurity risks,” JP Morgan analyst Brian Essex said in a note to clients this month.
Despite downward pressure on the costs of cyberattacks, the sector continues to grow as it treats cybersecurity incidents as a top priority. A report earlier this year by security technology company Fortinet highlighted that four of the five major companies have been set to have Cyber Security as C-suite-level responsibility for the next 12 months.
Cohesity’s AI Play
Cohesity’s growth also benefits from key partnerships with AI Chipmaker and Investor Nvidia.
Cohesity’s flagship AI product, named Gaia, turns traditionally supported data (previously considered “unuseable for AI purposes”) into an AI-powered enterprise search assistant.
Poonen said the groundbreaking idea of applying AI search technology known as Searched Generation (RAG) emerged from backing up data from a conversation with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella – Two men Poonen said they have known for many years given their previous experience as senior executives. vmware And Germany’s Sap.
“We were the first to implement rags in our backup,” Puenen said. “That’s what Nvidia benefited. They got it right away. They put the money into the company to help us.”
Poonen added that a successful IPO is a critical step, but it is not the endgame of his strategy.
“It’s a milestone. It’s a very important milestone, but not a destination,” he concluded.
