By 2013 Mohit Aron had already built something that made him a name. He co-founded Nutanix in 2009, and then, before it went public, he left to start another company. A Business Insider India headline later said he walked away from a $4 billion company because he had an even better idea.
He was born, according to Wikipedia-derived sources, in Pathankot, India. Family hardship is not documented in anything that could be read; what Aron has said himself is that his father's resilience mattered to him, and that his parents pushed their children toward the best education available. He took the entrance exam, YourStory reports, ranked 53, and entered IIT Delhi in 1991 for computer science.
He was born, according to Wikipedia-derived sources, in Pathankot, India.
The exam rank is the detail that stays with you. A teenager who placed among the top few dozen on the country's hardest technical entrance exam had, in effect, been told he could go anywhere. He went to Delhi, graduated in 1995, then to Rice University for a PhD in computer science, finished in 2000.
Then came the jobs that shaped his thinking. He joined a storage startup, Zambeel, in 2000, and Google in 2003, the year before its IPO. YourStory reports that he was part of the team that built the Google File System, the system that let Google store huge amounts of data across cheap machines.
Cohesity, started in June 2013, applied that thinking to the mess of copies that companies kept for backup and analytics. It announced itself in 2015 with $70 million raised, and added $90 million from GV and Sequoia in 2017 and $250 million from SoftBank's Vision Fund in 2018. By December 2021 it had raised about $660 million and filed for an IPO.
The listing did not arrive. In August 2022 Sanjay Poonen replaced Aron as chief executive. In December 2024 Cohesity completed the $3 billion purchase of Veritas, a far older company, and its Wikipedia infobox lists about $1.7 billion in revenue for 2025.
Aron's path had a pattern: leave when the next problem looks bigger than the current success. It made him a founder twice. It also meant that a company he began was, in the end, run by someone else.