NetApp acquires Israeli data protection start-up Cognigo

NetApp has quietly taken over a startup called D.Day Labs, which does business as Cognigo. Cognigo has confirmed the news. NetApp paid about 70 million U.S. dollars (62.8 million euros) for the startup, know Silicon Angle.

Cognigo sells a data protection platform for companies that have to comply with rules like the GDPR in Europe. The platform uses natural language processing and other artificial intelligence-based technologies to classify specific types of data according to categories in order to comply with laws. It supports data stored in the cloud and on premise, in both structured and non-structured formats.

Cognigo was founded in 2015 by its current CEO Guy Leibovitz and raised a total of 10.9 million dollars in two separate financing rounds.

Takeover

The acquisition does not come out of nowhere, as NetApp has been working with the startup for some years now. Cognigo’s 35 employees become part of NetApp’s R&D center in Israel. There are now between eighty and ninety employees working there. The company wants to use Cognigo’s technology to extend the usefulness of its Cloud Volume ONTAP data management software with the addition of an “artificial intelligence-driven compliance solution”.

Leibovitz states that the choice to be adopted was bittersweet. “But I’m sure it was the right choice. In a short time we reached the escape velocity that every startup wants. Sales tripled almost every quarter. We had a rapidly growing number of customers.”

Moor Insights & Strategy analyst Steve McDowell argues that the acquisition may be small, but it also makes it clear that the storage industry quickly runs less on bytes on a disk, and more on data management. “This is certainly the case when compliance and laws are at stake. It also reflects the trend of companies using more and more artificial intelligence in their data centers to manage their operations and data.