Helsinki-headquartered Verda, formerly known as Datacrunch, is today announcing a €100m debt and equity round led by Lifeline Ventures with participation from byFounders, Tesi, Varma, and other investors. The debt financing came from a group of Nordic financial institutions.
Europe has long lacked its own cloud platforms and has had to rely on alternatives from huge American hyperscalers AWS, Microsoft and Google. But the growing push for tech sovereignty in Europe has led to increased demand for homegrown compute in the region.
Verda will use the funding to accelerate the development of its AI cloud infrastructure across Europe, the US and Asia. The company already operates data centres in Finland and Iceland and has an office in London. It plans to open additional offices in California and Asia, CEO and founder Ruben Bryon, tells Sifted.
“For the time being, we're leasing data centre space and we are working on construction in Finland primarily, and then we are expanding construction to Sweden for larger sites,” he says.
Demand for frictionless compute purchases
Verda is building cloud infrastructure for developers and organisations that need computing power for AI training and inference. The company is vertically integrated, handling everything from physical infrastructure to the application layer.
“What we see happening among our customers is that there's an increased desire to have as little friction as possible to help themselves with a lot of compute,” Bryon says.
From the start Bryon wanted to solve the issue of having to talk to someone to get compute power to work on machine learning.
“Today it's not just a human anymore on the other side, it can be an entire flow driven by an AI agent,” he says. “So, we are purposefully dedicating our efforts towards building a platform that caters to that paradigm shift.”
Verda employs more than 100 people and has raised around €170m in total funding since the start. In September of last year, it raised €55m, and says it is now cash flow positive, with revenue run rate doubling to over $60m during the first quarter of 2026.
However, the capital Verda raised last year only lasted until January because of a surge in demand for its compute.
European neutrality — a selling point
Part of the increase in demand has to do with the European tech sovereignty angle.. However, Bryon believes it can also use its European neutrality as a global differentiator versus US-centric providers.
“We're doing this in Europe as a European company. A lot of European companies, at some point, change their headquarters to the US or Delaware,” he says.
“That is not something that we intend to do. We want to stay true to our goals to be a European company and more neutral. Not being a US company is quite important.”
The company is now looking to hire another 100 people, with a focus on engineering, especially within hardware and AI research.
“We have a dedicated AI lab team that works directly with customers and uses those insights to drive our product decisions. We're proud of what we've built so far, but we know we're only just getting started,” Bryon says.
