Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. Is ambitiously eying up the cloud with the purchase of Joyent Inc., which has previously raised $125 million in funding from sources like Intel Capital and Peter Thiel. The price of the acquisition was not disclosed.

Joyent Inc. is a cloud services provider that competes with giants like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure in the public cloud. It’s nowhere near as big as those rivals of course, but the company is notable for its innovations around containers and the Node.js programming language.

“[Until] today, we lacked one thing. We lacked the scale required to compete effectively in the large, rapidly growing and fiercely competitive cloud-computing market,” said Joyent CEO Scott Hammond in a blog entry announcing the sale.

Hammond added that Joyent, which was founded ten years ago, will continue to operate as an independent subsidiary of Samsung, though Joyent’s technologies will be integrated with Samsung’s mobile division, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Joyent shot to fame as a proponent of the red-hot container tech, espousing its benefits even before Docker Inc. burst onto the scene with its own popular version of the technology. Joyent is also one of the leading contributors to Node.js.

The immediate conclusion to be made from this deal is that it will help to bolster Samsung’s efforts around smart home devices and smart cars, which demand a solid cloud infrastructure behind them to deliver real value. Samsung is already a major customer of both AWS and Azure, so Joyent’s cloud platform would be ideal in that regard, handling the heavy lifting of computation and delivering to and from smartphones and other connected gadgets.

Still, Joyent said it will continue to serve its current customers as before. It added that by merging with Samsung, it will be better positioned to build out its expertise in powering mobile apps, a key market in a world that’s increasingly reliant on smartphones and their associated software.

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