Proposed acquisition positions PEAK AIO to scale its AI infrastructure technology and if completed would deliver a significant return for Pembroke VCT shareholders.
Pembroke, the London-listed venture capital trust, and its portfolio company, PEAK AIO, have announced that PEAK AIO has entered into an agreement to be acquired by NetApp, subject to customary completion conditions, including regulatory approvals.
The proposed transaction would support the next phase of PEAK AIO’s growth by combining its AI infrastructure technology with the NetApp Platform, global scale and customer reach.
PEAK AIO was founded in Manchester by Mark Klarzynski and was designed to address some of the industry’s most demanding data-intensive computing challenges. The company’s core innovation, a next-generation metadata architecture and high-performance parallel file system, was developed to solve one of the defining infrastructure challenges of the AI era: enabling shared storage to scale alongside the GPU clusters that power modern AI workloads.
For Pembroke, the acquisition by a NASDAQ-listed strategic buyer not only has the potential for significant return for shareholders, if completed, but further represents the strongest possible validation of the investment thesis: that backing a British founder with deep technical expertise, at an early stage, in a market that was still forming, would generate a compelling return for VCT shareholders.
Klarzynski said: “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. 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.”
Fred Ursell, Head of Investments at Pembroke Investment Managers and a Director of PEAK AIO, said: “Pembroke’s purpose is to back British founders early and support them through every stage of growth. PEAK AIO is one of the finest examples of what that looks like in practice. It’s a company built in Manchester, that has grown into a technology the global AI infrastructure market cannot ignore.
“This transaction is validation of that journey and a reminder of what British tech is capable of when it is given the right backing and the space to grow.”
PEAK AIO’s technology, which has its roots in collaborations with Los Alamos National Laboratory and Carnegie Mellon University, addresses the limitations of traditional storage architectures when confronted with the scale, concurrency and performance demands of large AI environments.
Pembroke invested in PEAK AIO in 2025 as part of its strategy of backing early-stage British technology companies with the potential to become category leaders. During its ownership, Pembroke supported the company’s funding round.
If completed, the realisation would be Pembroke’s first exit from a technology investment and Klarzynski third successful exit as a founder, underscoring the depth of entrepreneurial talent that the VCT model is designed to support.
AIDE (AI Deployment Engine) is an open-source enterprise orchestration platform designed for the UK National Health Service to securely integrate, execute and monitor medical AI applications within existing clinical workflows.
Created by the AI Centre for Value Based Healthcare in partnership with NVIDIA and Answer Digital, AIDE functions as a hospital “operating system” that connects AI research with frontline clinical care. PEAK AIO has supported AIDE (AI Deployment Engine) in transforming healthcare as hospitals transition to new operating systems.
