Verda, the Helsinki GPU cloud once called DataCrunch, raises $189m and passes a $1bn valuation

Verda, the Helsinki AI cloud provider that traded as DataCrunch until late 2025, has raised $189m (€163m) in a financing built around an oversubscribed Series B led by US venture firm Emergence Capital. The company says the deal values it at more than $1bn, which by its own account makes it Europe's newest unicorn.

The announcement came on 22 September. Verda did not disclose the exact valuation, only that it is above the billion-dollar mark.

A crowded cap table, from Tokyo to Finnish pension money

Emergence wrote the lead cheque, but the list of backers is long. MUFG Innovation Partners, the venture arm of the Japanese banking group, joined, as did server maker Supermicro, the Finnish pension insurer Varma, Lifeline Ventures, ENDUR, 6 Degrees Capital, byFounders and Tesi, Finland's state-owned investment company. A group of angels also came in, among them Ola Tørudbakken and Mark Saroufim, who is linked to Core Automation and the GPU MODE community.

Supermicro's presence is worth a second look. The company builds the servers that GPU clouds fill their racks with, so its stake ties a hardware supplier more closely to one of its European buyers. Varma and Tesi, for their part, keep Finnish institutional capital in a company that is now spending heavily outside Finland.

Joe Floyd, a general partner at Emergence, put the bet in simple terms. "Demand for AI compute is insatiable, and the gap between demand and supply is growing," he said. He added that Verda was moving fast to lock in and grow capacity. Emergence's portfolio already includes Together AI, a US company that also rents GPU capacity to AI developers.

Where the $189m goes

Verda says the money will go into every layer of what it sells, from the physical capacity at the bottom to the platform services that sit on top. Inference, the work of running trained models for end users, is singled out as a priority. The company also says it intends to multiply its compute capacity over the next 12 months and to keep expanding in Europe, the US and Asia.

That stack is unusually deep for a European cloud of its size. Verda runs its own data centres in the EU, which it says run on renewable power, and rents out NVIDIA GPU instances, self-service InfiniBand clusters, serverless GPU containers, managed storage and confidential computing. An internal AI Lab works with customers on training and inference jobs. One such customer, radiology AI developer Epsilon Health, says it trains models three times faster and runs five times as many experiments on a dedicated NVIDIA HGX B300 cluster from Verda.

Bryon framed the round as part of a much larger ambition than renting GPUs.

"Our north star is to build the first true tech company in Europe, with AI infrastructure as the starting foundation," said Ruben Bryon, Verda's founder and CEO.

He also said the company wants to cut the carbon footprint of compute worldwide, and that it was still a long way from finished.

Revenue nearly tripled in a few months

The growth numbers explain why investors were willing to pay up. Verda says its annualised revenue run rate hit $165m in July. When it announced its previous round in April, it put the figure at a little over $60m.

That April deal was itself sizeable. Lifeline Ventures led a $117m package that mixed equity with debt from Nordic lenders, which Verda later said had grown to $155m after the Nordic Investment Bank joined. Counting the new money, the company says it has now raised more than $450m in total, a figure that includes debt from financial institutions as well as equity. For comparison, Verda's seed round in 2024 was $13m.

The heavy use of debt is typical of GPU clouds, which need to buy hardware long before customers pay for it. In August Verda hired Mikko Einiö, a former Morgan Stanley banker and previously head of corporate development at Nokia, as chief financial officer to lead its capital strategy as it scales up.

From a garage to London and San Francisco

Bryon, a Belgian engineer who taught himself to code as a teenager, started the business in 2020 as a self-serve GPU cloud run from his garage in Helsinki. Arturs Polis is chief technology officer. The company now employs about 250 people of more than 40 nationalities and has recently opened offices in London and San Francisco.

The San Francisco office puts Verda closer to the frontier AI labs and agent builders that it names as its target customers. For European buyers, its pitch rests on capacity held in EU data centres.

The next test is execution. Multiplying capacity within a year means securing scarce NVIDIA hardware, power and data centre space while demand, by its lead investor's own account, outstrips supply. Verda has not said how much new capacity it plans to bring online, or where its next sites will be.