Blue Box is a managed services provider that has been offering cloud hosting since 2003. The Seattle-based firm has seen its business grow slowly but surely over the years, and today it boasts nearly 600 clients including big name companies such as MTV and VH1. The only missing piece in this start-up Cinderella story is that Blue Box hasn’t attracted any attention from the VC community – at least up until now.

The company announced the initial closing of a $3.5 million equity round led by Voyager Capital. It will use the capital to boost R&D, make more engineering hires and boost sales efforts.  Voyager managing director Bill McAleer is joining the Blue Box board of directors.

“Blue Box is a rapidly growing company that is profitable, has doubled revenue year-over-year for the last four years, and has already gained significant momentum in the market,² said Bill McAleer, Managing Director at Voyager Capital.  “Applications are moving online at a frenetic rate. However, companies are recognizing that managing the stack below the app is not their core competence. Blue Box has built a significant amount of core technology that enables its customers to build better applications.”

Blue Box leverages open-source technologies such as OpenStack, Chef and EMC Razor – alongside internally developed code – to support its hosted environment. The company operates data centers in the Seattle and Washington D.C. areas, and has plans to open a new facility overseas, a plan undoubtedly a step closer to completion.

The startup is carving its own niche in the cloud hosting space, the only way to go for small players who want a chance to compete with Amazon Web Services. Nirvanix has taken a similar approach only with a bigger emphasis on the enterprise, but competition is not the only thing it had to worry about lately.

Fearing that it NJ datacenter may be shut down by Hurricane Sandy, the startup gave concerned customers the option of moving their data to a different facility.