Verda, a Helsinki-based AI cloud company, has raised $189 million in a Series B round that pushes its valuation past $1 billion, the company said Tuesday, in the latest sign that investors remain eager to fund the physical infrastructure underpinning the artificial intelligence boom even as some warn the sector is overbuilding capacity.
The round was led by Emergence Capital, with participation from MUFG Innovation Partners, server maker Super Micro Computer, Finnish pension insurer Varma, and existing backers Lifeline Ventures, 6 Degrees Capital, byFounders and Tesi, according to Bloomberg's report on the raise. The company declined to disclose an exact valuation figure.
Verda, founded in 2020 by Ruben Bryon as DataCrunch before rebranding, sells GPU instances, InfiniBand-networked clusters, serverless containers, storage and managed inference to European developers and regulated enterprises seeking data residency inside the EU and an alternative to American hyperscalers such as AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, according to details reported by RuntimeWire. Its data centers in Finland and Iceland run on 100% renewable power, and the company says it is already cash-flow positive — a distinction few AI infrastructure startups can claim given the capital intensity of the business.
There's a window right now to build one of the defining compute companies of this generation.
Ruben Bryon, founder and CEO, Verda
Racing to Scale
The new capital will fund expansion toward more than 250 megawatts of data center capacity by 2027 across Europe, the U.K., the U.S. and Asia, along with continued deployment of Nvidia accelerators and faster provisioning for large-scale inference workloads. The Series B brings Verda's total funding to more than $450 million in combined equity and debt, following a $13 million seed round in 2024, a $64 million Series A in 2025, and a round that started at $117 million and was expanded to $155 million this past April.
The raise lands amid a broader scramble by European AI infrastructure players to establish sovereign alternatives to U.S. cloud giants, as governments and regulated industries on the continent grow more focused on keeping sensitive AI workloads and data within EU borders. Investors in Verda's round span strategic corporates, sovereign-linked capital and specialist venture funds — a mix the company is betting will help it compete for enterprise contracts that increasingly weigh geopolitical and energy considerations alongside raw compute price.
