Ruben Bryon, founder and chief executive of Verda. Credit: Verda Verda, an AI cloud company headquartered in Helsinki and previously called DataCrunch, has raised $189M to increase its computing capacity and develop its platform; the funds came from a Series B round led by Emergence Capital, which was oversubscribed, with additional investment also provided. The company states that this funding round has made it the most recent unicorn in Europe; Verda is now worth at least $1 billion, although it has not provided an exact figure. MUFG Innovation Partners, Supermicro, the Varma Mutual Pension Insurance Company, Lifeline Ventures, 6 Degrees Capital, byFounders, and the Finnish state investor Tesi were also involved.
The angel investors include Ola Tørudbakken from Meta and Mark Saroufim from Core Auto and GPUMODE. Five months ago, Lifeline Ventures conducted a $117M round that combined equity with debt from Nordic lenders. Verda then stated that the amount had increased to $155m after the Nordic Investment Bank took part. Verda, founded in Helsinki in 2020, has always managed the entire stack itself, covering its physical data centers and hardware, as well as its cloud platform and AI research.
The company provides compute and platform services to teams developing frontier AI systems and agents. The money raised will be put towards product development in each of those areas, with a particular focus on inference. Verda also plans to increase its computing capacity severalfold within a year. “AI is becoming critical infrastructure across industries, and the next few years are a pivotal window for Europe. Our north star is to build the first true tech company in Europe, with AI infrastructure as the starting foundation, and to bring down the carbon footprint of compute worldwide.
We’re proud of our progress but are a long way from being done,” said Ruben Bryon, Verda’s founder and CEO. Growth has been quick. Verda says its annualized revenue run rate reached $165m in July, well above the figure of more than $60m it reported at the time of the April round. “Demand for AI compute is insatiable, and the gap between demand and supply is growing,” said Joe Floyd, general partner at Emergence Capital. He described Verda as moving fast to secure and scale capacity, and said it could grow into one of the companies that shape AI infrastructure.
Moreover, Verda has added offices in London and San Francisco in recent months, and intends to expand further across Europe, the US, and Asia.
