Santa Monica’s EdgeCast announced Thursday it had raised $54 million to bolster its technology that delivers Web content from servers to a personal computer screen.

The equity and debt investment, EdgeCast’s series D, was led by Greenwich, Conn., private equity firm Performance Equity Management with follow on from existing investors Menlo Ventures in Menlo Park and Steamboat Ventures, the venture capital arm of Walt Disney Co. The equity portion of the financing was augmented with a debt facility from Silicon Valley Bank.

EdgeCast was founded in 2006 as a content delivery network, providing redundant servers that shorten the distance data must travel to increase the speed with which a website loads.

Despite big-name customers like Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr and Hulu, EdgeCast is still tiny in comparison to a handful of big players in the space. Most notable is Akamai Technologies in Cambridge, Mass., which has a market cap of more than $8 billion and handles more than 50 percent of the world’s e-commerce traffic.

Still, EdgeCast looks to be coming on strong. The company said it is now in its fourth year of profitability. As such, the company’s latest financing will be used as pure growth capital to expand its global network for improved performance, to update the quality of its technology and to tighten security.