NetApp has moved to buy British AI storage startup PEAK AIO in a deal aimed at pairing the smaller firm's high-performance architecture with NetApp's global storage platform, the companies announced on Monday.
London-listed venture capital trust Pembroke and PEAK AIO said the Manchester-founded company has entered into an agreement to be acquired by the NASDAQ-listed data storage giant, subject to customary completion conditions including regulatory approvals. The financial terms were not disclosed.
Storage built for the AI era
PEAK AIO was founded in Manchester by Mark Klarzynski to tackle data-intensive computing challenges. Its core innovation — a next-generation metadata architecture and high-performance parallel file system — was designed to solve a defining infrastructure problem of the AI era: enabling shared storage to scale alongside the GPU clusters that power modern AI workloads.
The company's technology traces its roots to collaborations with Los Alamos National Laboratory and Carnegie Mellon University, addressing the limitations of traditional storage architectures when confronted with the scale, concurrency and performance demands of large AI environments. PEAK AIO has also supported AIDE, an open-source orchestration platform developed for the UK National Health Service to securely integrate and monitor medical AI applications.
Klarzynski said the company was built on "a simple but radical premise: that the AI era deserved storage infrastructure built for it, not inherited from a previous generation of computing," adding that legacy storage could not meet "the scale and cost point that real AI projects demand."
A validation for British tech
Pembroke invested in PEAK AIO in 2025 as part of its strategy of backing early-stage British technology companies, supporting a subsequent funding round. Fred Ursell, Pembroke's head of investments and a director of PEAK AIO, called the deal validation of a journey that took a company "built in Manchester" into "a technology the global AI infrastructure market cannot ignore."
If completed, the realisation would be Pembroke's first exit from a technology investment and Klarzynski's third successful exit as a founder.
The deal is the latest in a wave of consolidation across AI infrastructure, as storage and data-management vendors race to serve the exploding compute demands of AI data centres.
Sources:
Intelligent CIO: NetApp proposes acquisition of PEAK AIO in AI infrastructure deal
www.intelligentcio.com
London-listed venture capital trust Pembroke and PEAK AIO said the Manchester-founded company has entered into an agreement to be acquired by the NASDAQ-listed data storage giant, subject to customary completion conditions including regulatory approvals. The financial terms were not disclosed.
Storage built for the AI era
PEAK AIO was founded in Manchester by Mark Klarzynski to tackle data-intensive computing challenges. Its core innovation — a next-generation metadata architecture and high-performance parallel file system — was designed to solve a defining infrastructure problem of the AI era: enabling shared storage to scale alongside the GPU clusters that power modern AI workloads.
The company's technology traces its roots to collaborations with Los Alamos National Laboratory and Carnegie Mellon University, addressing the limitations of traditional storage architectures when confronted with the scale, concurrency and performance demands of large AI environments. PEAK AIO has also supported AIDE, an open-source orchestration platform developed for the UK National Health Service to securely integrate and monitor medical AI applications.
Klarzynski said the company was built on "a simple but radical premise: that the AI era deserved storage infrastructure built for it, not inherited from a previous generation of computing," adding that legacy storage could not meet "the scale and cost point that real AI projects demand."
A validation for British tech
Pembroke invested in PEAK AIO in 2025 as part of its strategy of backing early-stage British technology companies, supporting a subsequent funding round. Fred Ursell, Pembroke's head of investments and a director of PEAK AIO, called the deal validation of a journey that took a company "built in Manchester" into "a technology the global AI infrastructure market cannot ignore."
If completed, the realisation would be Pembroke's first exit from a technology investment and Klarzynski's third successful exit as a founder.
The deal is the latest in a wave of consolidation across AI infrastructure, as storage and data-management vendors race to serve the exploding compute demands of AI data centres.
Sources:
Intelligent CIO: NetApp proposes acquisition of PEAK AIO in AI infrastructure deal
NetApp proposes acquisition of PEAK AIO in AI infrastructure deal – Intelligent CIO Europe
www.intelligentcio.com
