Helsinki-based Verda has raised $189 million in new financing, becoming Europe’s latest AI unicorn as the region’s infrastructure race expands beyond model development into data centers, GPUs and cloud platforms.
The company said its oversubscribed Series B was led by Emergence Capital, with MUFG Innovation Partners, Supermicro, Varma Mutual Pension Insurance Company, Lifeline Ventures, 6 Degrees Capital, byFounders and Tesi among the investors. Meta’s Ola Tørudbakken and Core Automation and GPUMODE co-founder Mark Saroufim also participated.
Tech.eu said the financing takes Verda’s total funding above $450 million and values the company at more than $1 billion.
Verda is competing on more than GPU access
Formerly known as DataCrunch, Verda is positioning itself differently from companies that mainly rent GPU capacity.
Sifted describes the company’s offering as spanning data centres, hardware and cloud infrastructure, while Verda calls its product a full-stack AI cloud covering the infrastructure needed to move from experimentation to training and large-scale inference.
The distinction matters because AI infrastructure is becoming a systems problem rather than simply a chip-supply problem. Training and serving large models requires compute capacity, orchestration, networking, data-center power and software that can keep expensive accelerators working efficiently.
Verda says the new financing will support development across all layers of its AI cloud, including inference, platform services and a planned multiplication of compute capacity over the next year.
Revenue has risen alongside demand for AI compute
The company is also showing significant commercial growth.
Tech.eu reported that Verda reached a $165 million annualized revenue run rate in July and has recently opened offices in London and San Francisco as it expands across Europe, the United States and Asia.
That figure is important because AI infrastructure companies need enormous amounts of capital before they can scale revenue. New GPU fleets, power capacity and data-center expansion require investment well beyond what most conventional software startups need.
Founder and CEO Ruben Bryon said there is a limited window to build a defining compute company from Europe.
Europe’s AI strategy increasingly depends on the layer underneath models
Verda’s funding therefore says something larger about where European technology is moving.
Much of Europe’s AI debate has focused on whether the region can produce frontier models and compete with American and Chinese labs. But those models ultimately depend on infrastructure: data centers, GPUs, energy and software capable of deploying enormous workloads reliably.
Verda joins a growing group of European companies trying to own more of that layer.
The challenge is that cloud infrastructure is a scale business. Demand may be strong, but keeping pace requires constant investment as newer accelerators arrive and customers expect larger clusters.
For European investors, that makes Verda a different kind of technology bet. It is not simply another software company scaling through relatively low-cost distribution.
It is part of an effort to build the computing foundation on which Europe’s future AI companies could run.
