Cohesity appoints Craig Martell as CTO

Data security and management company Cohesity has appointed Craig Martell as the chief technology officer. In this role, he will be bringing his industry expertise, especially in artificial intelligence (AI), to define and execute strategy and roadmap for the company. Further, founder, ex-CEO, chief strategy and technical officer Mohit Aron is stepping back to a founder emeritus role.

Before Cohesity, Martell was the chief digital and artificial intelligence (CDAO) officer for the US Department of Defense (DoD). In this first-of-its-kind role at DoD, Martell was responsible for accelerating the adoption of data, analytics, digital solutions, and AI functions. He was also involved in the digital and AI strategy development and policy formulation while ensuring the unity of mission and tighter integration for the department’s enterprise-wide data, AI, and cyber organisations.

“The speed and scale Cohesity has achieved over the last several years is a testament to the incredible technology platform the company has built at the junction of multi-cloud, security and AI for the future of data protection. My role will be to accelerate the innovation internally and the advocacy externally of Cohesity’s AI-powered innovations that are second to none,” said Martell on his appointment. 

Prior to DoD, he was part of companies such as Lyft, Dropbox, and LinkedIn – leading the artificial intelligence and machine learning teams. Martell was also a tenured computer science professor at the Naval Postgraduate School specialising in natural language processing, and is proficient in statistical principles and methodologies.

In February, Cohesity announced the acquisition of Veritas’ data protection operations. The combined entity will have a valuation of $7 billion.