Startup News: Data-management Cohesity revives its interest in going public

Cohesity filed IPO paperwork in December 2021 but ended up postponing its plan to go public after rising inflation and a resulting bear market for stocks in 2022 forced many private companies to remain on the sidelines.

This year, conditions are different. Emboldened by a rising stock market for tech companies this year, the data management company is the latest startup eyeing the public marketplace again.

In a recent interview with Business Insider, Cohesity CEO Sanjay Poonen said that his company could stage an IPO as soon as its investment bankers think it’s appropriate. "I would say we continue to be in a state of public readiness,” Poonen told Business Insider. “And as the market opens up, we'll pick the right time, whether it's fall, whether it's next year.”

Companies intent on going public often hire new executives suited to the task. Earlier this month, the company announced the hiring of Eric Brown and Srinivasan Murari as its chief financial officer and head of engineering, respectively.

Founded in 2013, San Jose, Calif.-based Cohesity develops software that allows companies to manage their data across a variety of different cloud providers. As of April 2020, the company had a valuation of $3.7 billion.

Axiom Space secures funding from Saudi and Korean backers

Axiom Space, a leading startup involved in commercial spaceflight, announced last week that it has raised $350 million in a new funding round led by South Korean investment firm Boryung and Saudi Arabia-based Aljazira Capital.

The company said in its press release that the new Series-C funding lifts its total funds raised from investors to more than $505 million, adding that it now has more than $2.2 billion in customer contracts.

Axiom Space said that the latest funding positions the company as “second to SpaceX for the most amount of money raised by a private space company in 2023, based on available Pitchbook data.”

Founded in 2016, Houston-based Axiom Space operates commercial flights to the International Space Station. But the company is also building the International Space Station’s successor, “Axiom Station,” the world’s first commercial space station in low-Earth orbit. As of December 2022, the company had a valuation of $2.06 billion.

Hugging Face reportedly gets a hug from software giant Salesforce

AI startups continue to attract the attention of the world’s leading tech companies. A case in point is Hugging Face, the New York City-based private company that develops algorithms and products for developers in the machine learning space.

Last week, tech news site The Information reported that Salesforce, the $200 billion market cap customer relationship software company, is leading a $200 million funding round that would effectively value Hugging Face at more than $4 billion, “according to two people with knowledge of the situation.”

According to The Information, the latest funding round would value Hugging Face at more than 100 times its annual revenue.

Earlier this month, Hugging Face attracted a big-time business partner in the version of Nvidia, the $1 trillion market cap chip company. The companies announced that software developers using the Hugging Face platform would get access to DGX Cloud, Nvidia’s all-inclusive AI “supercomputer” in the cloud.