Verda raises $189M Series B to scale Europe’s full-stack AI cloud

Helsinki’s Verda has raised $189 million (€164.8 million) in an oversubscribed Series B led by Emergence Capital, valuing the full-stack AI cloud company above $1 billion and making it Europe’s newest unicorn.

The round, announced on 22 September 2026, brings Verda’s total funding past $450 million. Alongside Emergence Capital, the Series B pulls in MUFG Innovation Partners, Supermicro, Varma and Tesi, with existing backers Lifeline Ventures, 6 Degrees Capital and byFounders returning. Angel investors Ola Torudbakken of Meta and Mark Saroufim join them.

The money goes where AI cloud money always goes: more compute. Verda says it will accelerate product development across every layer of its stack, build out inference capabilities, expand capacity and push further into Europe, the US and Asia, on top of the London and San Francisco offices it opened earlier in 2026.

An oversubscribed Series B with a ten-figure price tag

We have spent years lamenting that Europe cannot fund its own AI infrastructure, and the term sheets kept proving us right. This one complicates the story. A Silicon Valley lead, yes – but next to it a Japanese bank’s venture arm, a US server manufacturer, and two of Finland’s most institutional pools of capital: pension insurer Varma and state-owned investor Tesi.

That mix is the quiet headline. When a Finnish pension fund writes into a GPU cloud’s Series B, the asset class has stopped being exotic. Remember: this is the capital we keep saying is sitting on the sidelines of European tech. In Helsinki, some of it just got up.

The company reports a $165 million annualised revenue run rate as of July 2026, up from $100 million at the start of the year, and says it is cash flow positive – a phrase you will not hear often from GPU clouds, whose economics usually run on debt and hope.

From DataCrunch to 250 people and a rebrand

Verda started in 2020 as DataCrunch, founded by Belgian engineer Ruben Bryon, and took its new name in November 2025. The pitch is vertical integration: the company owns and operates its data centres in Finland and Iceland, both running on renewable energy, and controls everything from the hardware layer up through its cloud platform and AI research. It claims savings of up to 90 percent against the hyperscalers – a company figure, but one that explains why customers like Nokia, robotics maker 1X, ExpressVPN and Freepik rent their GPUs in the Nordics.

The team has grown to roughly 250 people from more than 40 nationalities, spread across Helsinki, London and San Francisco. The funding history tells its own story of acceleration: a €55 million Series A in September 2025, €102 million in equity in April 2026, a €22 million loan from the Nordic Investment Bank in July, and now this. “AI is becoming critical infrastructure,” Bryon said in the announcement, calling the next few years a pivotal window for Europe.

A GPU cloud market compounding at 26.5 percent

The market Verda sells into is in a full sprint. GPU as a Service was worth $8.21 billion globally in 2025 and is forecast to reach $26.62 billion by 2030, a 26.5 percent CAGR (MarketsandMarkets, March 2025). Every serious AI lab, robotics company and enterprise deploying models needs compute it does not want to build itself, and the hyperscalers’ pricing leaves room underneath for specialists.

For scale inside our own fundraising data: this is the third-largest European equity round we have tracked in September, behind Mistral AI’s €3 billion Series D and Fever’s $250 million growth round, and ahead of Penelope Health’s $100 million Series B. Three nine-figure rounds inside a week is not a coincidence; late-stage European capital is concentrating in companies with revenue to show.

What a Nordic neocloud signals for Europe

So why does this round land in Helsinki rather than Frankfurt or Paris? Electricity, mostly. Finland and Iceland offer cheap, renewable, abundant power and natural cooling – the two line items that decide whether a data centre makes money. The good news is that this advantage is structural, not cyclical: nobody is moving the geothermal fields.

The city that gave us Slush now has a homegrown answer to the question every European AI founder gets asked: where does your compute come from? Verda’s bet – and Emergence’s – is that sovereignty stops being a policy talking point and starts being a procurement criterion. Watch whether the next wave of European AI rounds names its cloud provider the way it names its lead investor.

Europe does not need a copy of AWS. It needs compute it controls, priced so builders can afford it, powered by energy it already has. Verda just raised $189 million to build exactly that. Let’s see who plugs in!