Cohesity, an AI-powered data security company, has secured a foundational patent from the US Patent and Trademark Office for the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architecture underlying Cohesity Gaia, its generative AI platform for enterprise data.
Patent No. 12,619,501, titled “Data Retrieval Using Embeddings for Data in Backup Systems” and issued on 5 May 2026, covers Cohesity’s method of combining secondary data systems with a RAG semantic layer to power GenAI applications. The company claims to be the first data protection vendor to patent this approach, which allows enterprises to run AI workloads directly against protected backup data without creating new data silos, replicating sensitive information, or weakening existing governance controls.
Unlocking Secondary Data for AI Without Movement
The significance lies in what the patent makes possible for ASEAN enterprises. Organisations typically accumulate years of high-value secondary data in files, emails, databases, and virtual machines that remain largely inaccessible for AI use cases — either because moving it creates security risk or because replicating it into separate AI infrastructure is operationally complex. Cohesity Gaia’s patent-protected RAG layer makes that data semantically searchable and usable by large language models without requiring it to be moved or copied, while preserving the security, governance, and access controls already in place.
“Protected recovery data is a goldmine. It is an organisation’s most important, complete, and trusted repository of enterprise information and institutional knowledge. Yet it remains among the most underutilised.” — Sanjay Poonen, CEO and President, Cohesity
The patent was invented by a team spanning engineering and executive leadership: Gregory Statton, Sanjay Poonen, Mohit Aron, and Apurv Gupta — a composition that reflects how central the underlying innovation is to Cohesity’s long-term platform strategy.
ASEAN Relevance: Data Sovereignty and Governance
Cohesity’s regional leadership has positioned the patent specifically in the context of ASEAN’s data sovereignty priorities. Gregory Statton, VP and CTO APJ at Cohesity, noted that regulatory compliance and sovereign, on-premise control are top customer priorities across the region — and argued that the patented RAG architecture addresses both by enabling AI-driven insights without requiring data to leave its governed environment.
Cohesity Gaia is available today as part of the Cohesity Data Cloud platform, which is trusted by customers in more than 140 countries and counts 70 per cent of the Fortune Global 500 among its client base.
