Verda Crosses $1 Billion With State and Server Backing

Verda raised $189 million (€163 million) on 22 September 2026 and said the round values the Helsinki AI cloud at more than $1 billion. Emergence Capital led an oversubscribed Series B led by Emergence Capital, and Finnish state capital, a national pension fund, a Japanese bank, and the GPU server vendor that already fills Verda’s racks all wrote checks beside it.

The company, founded in 2020 as a self-serve GPU shop, now employs about 250 people from more than 40 nationalities and has opened offices in London and San Francisco. It will spend the new money on inference products, platform software, and a plan to multiply compute capacity over the next year.

Verda’s $189 Million Round Stamps a $1 Billion Price

Verda Cloud Oy told investors the financing includes the Series B plus extra capital, and that total funding now stands at more than $450 million across equity and debt. It did not publish an exact post-money figure, only that the price is above $1 billion, which Tesi, the Finnish state investor, called Finland’s newest unicorn and which Verda called Europe’s latest.

The firm announced the round on its own account the same morning, with a short list of what the money is for: a large-scale inference service, faster software work, and more compute.

Today we are announcing $189M in new funding and becoming Europe’s latest unicorn.

This funding accelerates what we’ve been doing from day 0:

Building the most reliable and performant AI infrastructure for our customers.

Read more in the thread 🧵 pic.twitter.com/Gc3nnJKs7j

— Verda (@verdacloud) September 22, 2026

THE ROUND IN FOUR FIGURES

• $189 million: New funding dated 22 September 2026, logged as €163 million in Helsinki.
• More than $1 billion: Company-stated valuation after the round; no exact number was released.
• $165 million: Annualised revenue run rate in July 2026, up from more than $60 million in the first quarter.
• $450 million+: Cumulative equity and debt Verda says it has raised to date.

Joe Floyd, general partner at Emergence Capital, said demand for AI compute is insatiable and the gap between demand and supply is growing. He added that Verda is moving quickly to secure and scale capacity, with the technology, ambition, and momentum to become a defining AI infrastructure company.

Finnish State Capital Never Left the Cap Table

The headline lead is a San Francisco growth firm that once backed Salesforce and Zoom. The rest of the list is how Europe actually pays for GPU plants: a state investment company, a pension fund, a Japanese megabank’s venture arm, Nordic funds that have been in since the seed, and the manufacturer of the racks.

Tesi, officially Finnish Industry Investment Ltd, first put money into the company in 2025 and has followed in every round since. Samppa Sirviö, investment manager in Tesi’s venture and growth team, said Verda is scaling a full-stack AI cloud globally and that these are still early steps. Tesi’s public case for staying in is domestic ownership, so that jobs, tax, and know-how stick in Finland, plus a 2025 to 2029 goal of helping create six to eight new unicorns in Finland.

Varma Mutual Pension Insurance Company has been on the cap table since that same 2025 round. Lifeline Ventures, which led the April package, came back. So did byFounders, the Nordic firm that led the Series A. New names this time include MUFG Innovation Partners, 6 Degrees Capital, ENDUR, and Super Micro Computer, alongside angels Ola Tørudbakken of Meta and Mark Saroufim of Core Automation and GPU MODE.

WHO WROTE THE CHECKS

That mix is not a standard SaaS cap table. Pension money and a state holding sit next to a listed hardware vendor, which is how a capital-heavy GPU cloud gets built when a single equity cheque cannot buy the whole plant.

Why Emergence Wrote the Lead Check

Floyd’s own investment note is blunt about the usual GPU-cloud maths: finance chips on debt, lease them for three to five years, and hope utilisation and market rates hold. He called Verda the exception, a Helsinki company that hit a $165 million annualised revenue run rate in July 2026 and was cash-flow positive as revenue doubled from the start of the year.

Named customers on that note include 1X, Freepik, and ExpressVPN. Tesi has separately named Nokia among the firms running work on the platform. Verda says it now powers AI jobs for organisations in more than 50 countries.

Demand for AI compute is insatiable, and the gap between demand and supply is growing. Verda is moving quickly to secure and scale capacity, with the technology, ambition, and momentum to become a defining AI infrastructure company.

Joe Floyd, General Partner, Emergence Capital press statement

Emergence already backs Together, which it describes as a production platform for open-source AI with contracted annualised revenue above $1 billion, and Arcee on open-weight models. Floyd’s line is that open models only win if they are cheap to run, which needs power, cooling, chips, and a team that keeps the cloud live. He is treating Verda as that third leg, and he is treating the Nordics as the place with spare electricity and a clean grid to do it.

Ruben Bryon, Verda’s founder and chief executive, put the same bet in plainer words in the Helsinki release.

AI is becoming critical infrastructure across industries, and the next few years are a pivotal window for Europe. Our north star is to build the first true tech company in Europe, with AI infrastructure as the starting foundation, and to bring down the carbon footprint of compute worldwide. We’re proud of our progress but are a long way from being done.

Ruben Bryon, Founder and CEO, Verda press release

The Server Maker Took Equity After Shipping Racks

Supermicro’s cheque in September follows a hardware deal it announced on 27 May 2026. Verda selected Supermicro’s liquid-cooled NVIDIA Blackwell systems for its European plants, including GB300 NVL72 rack-scale machines, HGX B300 and HGX B200 nodes, and RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition boxes.

GPU clouds taking equity from the firms that sell them servers is now a familiar move, and Supermicro’s seat on this round follows that pattern. The vendor gets a customer that needs a lot of metal; the customer gets a supplier with a reason to keep the pipeline full.

Charles Liang, Supermicro’s president and chief executive, said the firm’s rack-scale kits let customers such as Verda put energy-efficient AI plants in quickly. Bryon said the AI cloud built for the next decade is on-demand, full-stack, and purpose-built for the jobs customers actually run.

The same May note said Verda’s Finnish sites run on 100% renewable power and that the company is working with local utilities to reuse waste heat for the heating of up to 15,000 local homes. That is the carbon half of Bryon’s north star, sitting beside a plan to multiply the number of GPUs on the floor.

RACKS ALREADY ON THE FLOOR

• GB300 NVL72: Rack-scale NVIDIA Blackwell systems Verda lists from a single tray up to more than two racks, with NVLink v5.
• HGX B300 and B200: Liquid-cooled training and inference nodes in the May Supermicro deployment.
• RTX PRO 6000: Blackwell Server Edition cards aimed at enterprise and visualisation jobs.
• Vera Rubin: Verda said on 2 June 2026 that early VR200 NVL72 and HGX Rubin NVL8 deployments would land in the second half of 2026, with expected capacity above 100,000 GPUs through 2027.

Public cluster listings on Verda’s own site still sell older and current generations side by side, from H200 up through GB300, on pay-as-you-go terms with no minimum contract.

Garage Origins, Then a Nordic Debt Stack

Bryon launched the company from a garage in Helsinki in 2020, joined by Miłosz and Tamir, and the firm says it was cash-flow positive within weeks. The product was a self-serve GPU cloud for people who could not get time on big-name clouds. The legal name was DataCrunch until 5 November 2025, when it became Verda.

Equity arrived late for a company that old. Seed funding of $13 million closed in 2024. A Series A of €55 million ($64 million) followed on 8 September 2025, led by byFounders, with Tesi’s first cheque, Varma, Skaala, and J12 Ventures. On 24 April 2026 Tesi said Verda had raised another €100 million ($117 million) in equity led by Lifeline Ventures plus debt from Nordic lenders, and that the run rate had doubled to more than $60 million in the first quarter while operations stayed cash-flow positive.

The public-bank layer came in the summer. On 10 July 2026 the Nordic Investment Bank signed a four-year €22 million InvestEU loan for GPUs, networking, and storage, to be installed mainly in Finnish data centres. Verda said that participation extended its then-latest funding round to $155 million. In August it hired Mikko Einiö, a former Morgan Stanley banker and Nokia corporate-development chief, as chief financial officer to run capital strategy.

THE MONEY AND THE METAL

1. 2020: Ruben Bryon launches a self-serve GPU cloud from a Helsinki garage; the company later says it was cash-flow positive within weeks.
2. 2024: DataCrunch closes $13 million in seed funding to expand its in-house AI lab and platform.
3. 8 September 2025: Series A of €55 million ($64 million) brings in Tesi and Varma; the firm still trades as DataCrunch.
4. 5 November 2025: DataCrunch changes its name to Verda, with no change to products.
5. 24 April 2026: €100 million ($117 million) equity-and-debt package; first-quarter run rate above $60 million.
6. 27 May 2026: Supermicro announces the Blackwell rack deployment and the 15,000-home heat plan.
7. 10 July 2026: NIB’s €22 million loan; Verda says the round is now $155 million; July run rate reaches $165 million.
8. 22 September 2026: $189 million Series B; valuation above $1 billion; total funding above $450 million.

July’s $165 million run rate is more than six times a $1 billion price only if that price is a floor, which is how the company described it. The new equity cheque is also roughly one year of that run rate, which is why the debt stack and the vendor relationship matter as much as the cap table.

More Than 250 Megawatts Is the 2027 Target

Verda told customers it will have more than 250 MW of operations in 2027, with data-centre capacity live in Finland now and more coming in Europe, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Asia. A June product note put the 2027 hardware ambition above 100,000 GPUs, including the Rubin generation. Live capacity today is still the Finnish plants; the other regions are a build.

$189 million does not, on its own, buy 250 MW of GPU halls. The company has already used Nordic bank debt and an InvestEU loan to pay for chips, and it now has its server vendor on the register. The Series B is the valuation stamp that makes the next layer of project finance easier to raise, which is the work Einiö was hired to do.

WHAT WE KNOW

• Live sites: Verda’s operating data centres are in Finland and run on 100% renewable power, per the company and its hardware partner.
• Stated 2027 target: More than 250 MW of operations, with extra sites planned in Europe, the UK, the US, and Asia.
• Near-term kit: Blackwell racks already ordered from Supermicro; earliest Vera Rubin deployments described in June as landing in the second half of 2026.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• Exact valuation: The company says more than $1 billion and has declined to give the number.
• Sites outside Finland: Offices exist in London and San Francisco; the company has not said a non-Finnish data centre is already live.
• 100,000 GPUs: That 2027 figure is a company target, not a disclosed purchase contract.

The product roadmap attached to the raise is narrower than the megawatt slide. Verda wants a managed inference layer for long, bursty agent jobs, plus the unglamorous enterprise kit (audit logs, single sign-on, confidential computing) that banks and health firms ask for before they move production off a hyperscaler. Instant clusters are already sold with InfiniBand, Kubernetes, and a claim that a job can be up in 20 minutes.

Bryon’s carbon line and the 250 MW line will have to live together. Finnish hydro and waste-heat pipes help the first; the second still needs substations, permits, and chips that a $189 million round can only part-fund. The people with the most skin in that gap are the ones who were already on the register: Tesi, Varma, NIB, and the vendor now holding shares in its customer.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was Verda called before it rebranded?

The company operated as DataCrunch from its 2020 founding until 5 November 2025, when it changed name without changing products. The Series A that first brought in Tesi and Varma was still raised under the DataCrunch name, and that was also when the firm said it became an NVIDIA Preferred Partner.

How did the Nordic Investment Bank fund Verda before this round?

On 10 July 2026 NIB signed a four-year €22 million loan backed by the InvestEU programme, earmarked for graphics processors plus networking and storage, with the new servers destined mainly for Finnish data centres. Verda said that participation extended its then-latest funding round to $155 million, before the September Series B took total funding above $450 million.

What does a GPU hour cost on Verda’s public clusters?

Verda’s instant-cluster listings price a GB300 GPU at $9.249 an hour, a B300 at $8.044, a B200 at $6.619, and an H200 at $4.458, with multi-node clusters offered from two nodes up, no minimum term, and a stated provision time of as little as 20 minutes.

Which earlier Finnish unicorns does Tesi group with Verda?

Tesi lists ICEYE, IQM, and Bluefors as earlier names in its current strategy period, and it flags Bluefors as an indirect holding through a fund. Verda is the most recent company it has described as reaching unicorn status in that 2025 to 2029 window.

Was Verda already making money before the unicorn round?

Emergence said the company was cash-flow positive in 2026 while revenue doubled to a $165 million run rate in July. In April, when Tesi backed the €100 million package, Verda said operations were already cash-flow positive with a run rate that had doubled to more than $60 million in the first quarter, so the later July figure is a further jump from a base that was already covering its costs.