Helsinki-based startup DataCrunch has secured €55m to scale up its AI computing infrastructure and capitalise off the growing demand for cheaper and more sovereign compute capacity.
The round, a combination of debt and equity, was led by Danish VC fund byFounders, Wise cofounder Taavet Hinrikus’ family office Skaala, pension fund provider Varma and Finnish sovereign wealth fund Tesi. The debt financing comes from Nordea, Armada Credit Partners, Danske Bank, Norion Bank and Local Tapiola.
The round comes under a year after DataCrunch’s first VC investment, a €12m seed round in October last year. The company, which was founded in 2020, was initially bootstrapped.
DataCrunch provides companies, be it startups or corporates, with computing power. Cloud computing services have typically been provided by companies like Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform. DataCrunch aims to provide computing power specifically aimed at AI training and inference.
It operates four data centres in Finland and Iceland. Current customers include Sony and Freepik.
Cheap and flexible compute
The idea for DataCrunch came after founder Ruben Bryon realised the incumbent companies didn’t offer a package suitable for early-stage startups in need of cheap and flexible compute.
“For me, someone who was hacking away in the basement, I couldn't find a service that aligned with what I wanted to achieve, the pricing was just completely out of whack,” says Bryon.
Startups scaling rapidly often hit inflexible quotas on their compute capacity, says Bryon: “If you're facing annoyances like quotas with the hyperscalers, that is often something that we can help our customers with to be much faster in making sure that the customer is not running out of compute on our platform.”
The company’s main data centre is located in central Helsinki and waste heat from the site is used to warm the city.
An increasing number of companies are choosing DataCrunch because it’s a European hyperscaler, says Bryon. “We have a growing number of customers which are much more security sensitive and which, by default, cannot really work with the US providers. They are looking for alternatives in Europe.”
DataCrunch plans to use its new funds to build more infrastructure and deploy the latest GPUs: in this case, Nvidia’s B300 and GB300 systems.
