Funds managed by Ares Management’s Infrastructure Opportunities and Alternative Credit Strategies (“Ares”) has made a strategic investment in Bluepeak, a regional fiber broadband service provider in the Great Plains.
The amount of the investment was not disclosed.
The investment will be used to accelerate Bluepeak’s Great Plains deployment which, to this point, has reached more than 140,000 homes. The service provider offers 5 Mbps service to residential customers and 10 Mbps to business customers.
“Bluepeak is committed to providing reliable, high-speed internet and top-tier customer service to our communities,” the company’s CEO Rich Fish said in a prepared statement. “We are incredibly proud of the Bluepeak team’s accomplishments to date, and we are excited to bring our services to additional communities with the benefit of this capital injection from Ares.”
Keith Derman, co-head of the Ares Infrastructure Opportunities strategy, said he believes that this structured investment will help accelerate Bluepeak’s expansion into “several attractive markets.”
Bluepeak’s predecessor was cable provider Vast Broadband. It was acquired by GI Data Infrastructure in February 2021. At that time, the network, based on DOCSIS 3.1 technology, passed 150,000 homes in Sioux Falls and Rapid City, S.D.
Bluepeak now is focusing on FTTH. It began the transition in late 2021 and by the end of its fiscal 2022 year had opened 18 markets in Minnesota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, North Dakota and Wyoming.
