Helsinki-based Verda, the AI cloud company known until last November as DataCrunch, has raised $189 million in a round led by Emergence Capital that values it at $1 billion or more, making it Europe’s newest unicorn and one of the few homegrown challengers to the American hyperscalers in the race to sell GPU compute.
The financing, announced on September 22 and first reported by Bloomberg, combines an oversubscribed Series B led by the San Francisco venture firm with additional investment. The investor list reads like a map of the AI infrastructure supply chain: MUFG Innovation Partners, the venture arm of Japan’s largest bank; server maker Supermicro; Finnish pension giant Varma Mutual Pension Insurance Company; Lifeline Ventures; 6 Degrees Capital; byFounders; and Tesi, Finland’s state-owned Finnish Industry Investment. Angel backers include Ola Tørudbakken of Meta and Mark Saroufim of Core Auto and GPUMODE. Verda has not disclosed an exact valuation, saying only that it now sits above the $1 billion mark.
The round lands just five months after Verda raised $117 million in April in a deal led by Lifeline Ventures that mixed equity with debt from Nordic lenders, a figure the company later said grew to $155 million once the Nordic Investment Bank joined. According to EU-Startups, that included a roughly 22 million euro NIB loan secured in July. The new money brings Verda’s total funding to more than $450 million.
So has the revenue growth. Verda says it hit a $165 million annualized revenue run rate in July, up from the more than $60 million it reported at the time of its April raise, according to The Next Web. That is well over a doubling in roughly three months, the kind of curve that has turned GPU clouds into one of the hottest categories in venture and public markets alike.
“AI is becoming critical infrastructure across industries, and the next few years are a pivotal window for Europe,” said Ruben Bryon, Verda’s founder and CEO. “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.”
Founded by Bryon in Helsinki in 2020, Verda runs what it calls a full-stack AI cloud, owning everything from physical data centers and hardware up through its cloud platform and in-house AI research. Its customers are teams building frontier models and AI agents who rent on-demand GPU capacity. The company says its Finnish data centers run on 100 percent renewable energy, leaning on the Nordics’ cheap clean power and cold climate for cooling efficiency. The rebrand from DataCrunch was meant to signal that positioning: the company says the name draws on the Spanish word for “true” and the Esperanto word for “green.”
The lead investor framed the deal as a straightforward bet on scarcity. “Demand for AI compute is insatiable, and the gap between demand and supply is growing,” said Joe Floyd, general partner at Emergence Capital. “Verda is moving quickly to secure and scale capacity, with the technology, ambition, and momentum to become a defining AI infrastructure company.”
Verda says the capital will fund product development across every layer of its stack, with a particular emphasis on inference, and plans to multiply its compute capacity severalfold over the next year. The company, which employs around 250 people from more than 40 nationalities, recently opened offices in London and San Francisco and intends to keep expanding across Europe, the US and Asia.
Why It Matters
Verda is the latest entrant in a crowded but fast-growing class of neoclouds, the specialist GPU providers that have grown up alongside Amazon, Microsoft and Google by selling raw accelerator capacity to AI labs. CoreWeave proved the model at scale in the United States, while Amsterdam-headquartered Nebius and London’s Nscale have emerged as Europe’s most prominent contenders. Verda’s pitch sits at the intersection of two themes that European policymakers and investors keep returning to: sovereign compute that keeps sensitive AI workloads on European soil under European jurisdiction, and energy, where the Nordics’ abundant renewable power offers a structural cost and carbon advantage over grid-constrained markets.
The cap table reinforces that framing. A Finnish state investor and a major Finnish pension fund sitting alongside a Silicon Valley lead suggests local institutions see Verda as strategic national infrastructure, not just a venture bet. Supermicro’s participation ties Verda more closely to a key hardware supplier at a time when securing servers and accelerators is often the binding constraint on growth, and MUFG’s presence hints at the Asian expansion the company has flagged.
The emphasis on inference is also telling. Training workloads are lumpy and dominated by a handful of labs, while inference demand scales with every deployed product and agent. Neoclouds that can offer reliable, low-latency inference platforms, rather than simply renting bare-metal GPUs, stand a better chance of holding customers as hardware supply loosens and prices compress.
What to Watch
The first test is execution on capacity. Verda has promised to multiply its compute over the next year, and investors will be watching whether it can secure enough power, sites and next-generation accelerators to do so without the delays that have tripped up other builders. Its revenue trajectory, from more than $60 million in run rate in April to $165 million in July, sets a high bar for the next disclosure.
The second is competition for European sovereign workloads. As governments and enterprises across the continent push to keep AI infrastructure local, Verda will be competing with Nebius, Nscale and the hyperscalers’ own sovereign cloud offerings for the same contracts. Whether its full-stack approach and clean-energy positioning translate into large, long-term commitments from European customers will determine if Bryon’s ambition to build “the first true tech company in Europe” is more than a slogan.
“Demand for AI compute is insatiable, and the gap between demand and supply is growing.”— Joe Floyd, General Partner, Emergence Capital