In this video, Cohesity CEO Sanjay Poonan tells The Forecast about advice he got from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang that led him on a journey to build a multi-billion-dollar, AI-powered data security company.

Find more enterprise cloud news, features stories and profiles at The Forecast.

Jason Lopez: Cohesity is a cybersecurity company led by Sanjay Poonan. He told The Forecast how he came to Cohesity on advice from Nvidia, CEO, Jensen Huang.

Sanjay Poonan: He said something that really rang with me, which is, you've done the big company stuff, 20 billion, 10 to 20 billion at SAP, six 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. That's what I saw as the opportunity of Cohesity. It was a world-class company. It was about a $300-million company when I joined, with fantastic technology and an incredible founder. In fact, many of the customers told me it was the best tech they'd 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 and the leader in the 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.

[Related: Composable Data Centers That Power Enterprise AI]

The entire product is based on notions of machine learning and AI. Before generative AI, the founders were Google folks who built a lot of key capabilities of ML and AI into the product. 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 driven by 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. Jenssen's words were Cohesity backs up the world's data and they're building their RAG application called Cohesity Gaia on top of the 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. 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 sort of flying a flashing of torch light 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.

[Related: Raising Ransomware Resistance]

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 Global 500, and it's the name brand and financial services, tech, telco, healthcare, you name it. The 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.

[Related: Protecting Against Ransomware at the Data Level]

Number two, we obsess about our customers. We get an anchor customer, particular vertical. We study their needs, we drive what they need. And then every customer, that vertical becomes automatically like that anchor customer. You pick the largest bank, make 'em successful, pick the public sector agency and 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 at Veritas. We're now on the path to being a 2 billion company and the biggest space, number one, but the enormous amount of innovation and we're pouring a lot of engineering including into our exciting new work we're doing on Nutanix, which I'm very excited about.