PEAK:AIO, the Manchester-based data infrastructure provider, is being acquired by Nasdaq-listed US giant NetApp for an undisclosed sum.
PEAK:AIO operates in the space between AI and storage, and customers include the UK government, NHS, Ministry of Defence and BT.
PEAK:AIO’s technology stemmed from collaborations with leading research institutions, including Los Alamos National Laboratory and Carnegie Mellon University. The company originally focused on software-defined storage, and the advent of AI-driven storage has now seen NetApp jump in.
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Last October, PEAK:AIO raised over $6.8m in a seed funding round led by Pembroke VCT with a $5m investment, with participation from Praetura Ventures, and another unnamed investor.
The company said at the time it would use the funding to continue investing in AI to grow its solution for the data storage sector and further expand its global presence.
PEAK:AIO has won industry attention by solving one of AI’s most urgent challenges: data acceleration. Deployed across multiple AI verticals, the platform has set records for delivering low-latency, high-efficiency performance, from edge inference to core model training, making it a good choice for AI teams who can’t afford bottlenecks or downtime.
The acquisition will accelerate NetApp’s AI infrastructure roadmap by augmenting metadata services and parallel namespace innovation, designed to help AI clouds scale shared storage alongside growing GPU clusters, said NetApp.
By combining PEAK:AIO’s specialised metadata innovations with NetApp ONTAP software, customers will benefit from a “differentiated architecture” that “preserves the resilience, security, and operational maturity of ONTAP, while introducing a new level of scalability for AI workloads”, we are told.
“AI clouds need high-performance shared storage that can scale alongside growing GPU clusters while maintaining the resilience, security, and operational simplicity organisations depend on,” said George Kurian, chief executive officer of NetApp. “With PEAK:AIO, we are delivering on our vision for a new generation of AI infrastructure that combines scalable metadata services with the proven foundation of ONTAP to help customers maximise infrastructure efficiency and support AI at hyperscale cloud.”
PEAK:AIO founder Mark Klarzynski added: “We built PEAK AIO on a simple but radical premise: that the AI era deserved storage infrastructure built for it, not inherited from a previous generation of computing,” said Klarzynski.
“Legacy storage was never going to work at the scale and cost point that real AI projects demand.
“We’re excited to join NetApp as our platform, their global reach and the trust its customers place in ONTAP give our architecture a home where it can scale to the largest AI environments in the world.
“I could not be more proud of what the team has built, or more excited about what we build next and want to thank Pembroke for its stewardship.”
