In its $14 million Series E funding round, hybrid cloud storage company Avere Systems has added a new backer - Google.

The search giant joined existing investors Menlo Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Tenaya Capital and Western Digital Capital in the round, bringing the total investment in Avere to $97 million.

Google’s plan to throw money at the cloud

Avere FXT 5000 series generic
Avere FXT 5000 series  – Avere Systems

“For the last several years, we’ve been laser focused on expanding our product offerings to help customers overcome their biggest infrastructure challenge - embracing the cloud,” Ron Bianchini, president and CEO of Avere, said.

“In 2016 alone, Avere has grown its cloud business by 97 percent, nearly doubling growth from the previous year, and closed the year with cloud offerings driving close to half of our annual bookings. This latest investment is a testament to our momentum, the strength of our partnerships, and the hard work our team has dedicated to delivering innovative solutions.”

The company’s cloud storage platform FXT Edge Filer can scale compute and storage resources depending on application requirements.

Avere already counted Google Cloud Platform as one of its customers (along with Amazon Web Services), but the new investment hints at a deeper partnership between the two companies.

Crucially, the investment came from Google itself, not its venture capital arm GV or later-stage investment fund CapitalG.

Google Cloud has ramped up investments and acquisitions since Diane Greene was placed in charge in November 2015 - herself hired in a $383m purchase of cloud-based developer platform Bebop.

Last year, Google Cloud acquired Synergyse, a business built around teaching customers how to use Google cloud apps; in July it bought video streaming company Anvato; and in August it acquired Orbitera, a startup that develops a platform for buying and selling cloud-based software, for over $100m. 

Then, in one of the company’s largest acquisitions to date, it bought API management company Apigee for $625 million.

Earlier this month at Google Cloud Next, during a keynote where it revealed it had spent heavily on its cloud service, the company also said it had recently acquired Kaggle, a platform for predictive modeling and analytics competitions.