Startup Panzura has raised $32 million to compete in the crowded — and increasingly well-funded — market for cloud-based storage.

It appears to be the company's fifth round of funding, although yesterday's announcement termed it a "growth capital round" rather than a Series E.

The news comes about a month after Nasuni, a fellow network-attached storage player, raised a $25 million Series E.

Like Nasuni and Ctera, Panzura targets enterprises that are deploying hybrid clouds. Panzura's service archives all data in the cloud but also keeps a fraction of it available locally in flash memory. It's a common strategy, whereby everything gets saved in a low-cost medium, but the most actively used data is within arm's reach.

The same trick can be performed by the incumbents such as EMC and NetApp. Panzura's pitch is that those companies are too interested in on-premises storage to go all-in with a cloud-based plan.

"If you look at how quota structures and business models are built, it's an on-premises storage model," says Patrick Harr, Panzura's CEO. "We keep 100 percent of the data in a cloud-based environment."

Harr, who arrived in May, comes from a storage incumbent; he'd spent five years as a vice president with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).

His career has also taken him through VMware and a handful of storage startups. He was the founding CEO of Nirvanix, which made an early attempt at a cloud-storage service but shut down in 2013. (Harr had left for VMware in 2009.)

He was also the CEO of Preventsys (acquired by McAfee, which was acquired by Intel) and Sanera (acquired by McData, which was acquired by Brocade).

Panzura's latest funding was led by Matrix Partners and also included Meritech Capital Partners, Opus Capital, Chevron, Western Digital, and an undisclosed strategic investor. Panzura, founded in 2008, raised $50 million in its series B through D rounds.