SingleHop, an IaaS and cloud computing concern started in 2006, has gotten its first institutional financing, a $27.5 million round led by Battery Ventures. American Chartered Bank also participated in the round.

Battery's general partner Dave Tabors along with Morad Elhafed will be joining the SingleHop board.

CEO Zak Boca claims SingleHop's "business is unique in the hosting industry because all of our services are provided through our proprietary and fully automated platform. This gives us great operational advantages, and with the growing demand for hybrid solutions, it also positions us very well to offer a unified experience to our clients."

Basically a sleeper, SingleHop says it spent its first two years in business developing a proprietary management platform called LEAP that enables clients to design, deploy and manage all their Internet infrastructure from a unified platform. That appears to cover both dedicated and cloud servers.

It offers customers a "Bill of Rights" by way of SLAs. See www.singlehop.com/sla/.

It says it's got over 10,000 servers in production representing clients in 114 countries.

Last year it had 3,500 customers that produced $22 million in revenues, up 75% from 2010.

It's got three data centers, two in Chicago, where it lives, and one opening in Phoenix, Arizona. The company doesn't say why it took on the $27.5 million but data center expansion may be the reason. That stuff's expensive.

It's got 80 people in the two towns.

Inc. Magazine named SingleHop the No. 25 fastest-growing US company last year.