Cloud provider Peak raises $4M in the shadows of bigger players

Amazon Web Services has swelled to such a large size in the public cloud market that news about competitors can sometimes fly under the radar. That was the case yesterday following word that public cloud provider Peak had raised $4 million in new venture funding.

Peak’s new money comes from previous investors Meritage Funds and Sweetwater Capital, according to the company’s press release on the round. The Denver-based company has now raised $13 million.

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The press release notes Peak’s “continued explosive demand for cloud computing services,” and chief executive Luke Norris is quoted as saying the company has “seen over 430% growth over the past two years.”

And yet, despite all the growth, the company’s new funding attracted hardly any attention in the press.

For better or for worse, the company has built itself into a specialty cloud provider.

Peak, founded in 2006, specializes in relationships with its channel partners, who can turn around and stick their names on Peak’s offering to call it their own. Its data centers are stocked with hip servers based on Facebook’s Open Compute Project standards, and it provides storage on fast solid-state drives and on highly reliable disk drives. It maintains data centers at seven sites in the U.S. and one in London. Service providers that work with Peak include Avnet Cloud Solutions, Comstor, Mountain States Networking, NYI, and Sayers, according to an online list.

In addition to Peak, a few other fairly distinctive public cloud providers have received venture funding in the past few months. Fair warning, though — they’re not the biggest names.

Virtustream, which emphasizes deployments for big companies such as Domino Foods and Yum Restaurants, picked up a $40 million investment from enterprise software company SAP, for example. And DigitalOcean, a fast-growing public cloud supplier that calls itself “built for developers,” announced $3.2 million in fresh cash in August.

These companies could end up getting bought by larger ones seeking unique positions in the cloud market.

But legacy technology vendors themselves have been busy tinkering with their cloud plays, arguably trying to look different from other players. IBM has been adding to its portfolio of Watson services in the cloud and researching ways to provide cloud computing with a minimal carbon footprint. And Dell is gunning for a role as a multi-cloud enabler.

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One reason for such activity: Amazon commands such a large amount of all the cloud attention, with its hundreds of thousands of customers, including Airbnb, Lionsgate, Netflix, and Pinterest.

Peak — formerly known as PeakColo — can’t make such big claims. But it can brag about sticking to its own playbook. And as cloud computing keeps picking up, Peak’s band of devotees stands to grow further.