Verda Raises $189M Series B, Crosses $1 Billion Valuation

Verda, a Helsinki-based AI cloud provider, said Tuesday it raised $189 million in an oversubscribed Series B led by Emergence Capital, pushing its valuation above $1 billion and making it Europe's newest AI infrastructure unicorn. The company did not disclose the exact valuation figure, only that it crossed the unicorn threshold.

The round brings Verda's total funding to more than $450 million, according to the company's own announcement. Supermicro, MUFG Innovation Partners, Varma Mutual Pension Insurance Company, Lifeline Ventures, 6 Degrees Capital, byFounders and Tesi, Finland's state investment company, joined Emergence Capital in the round, alongside angel investors including Meta's Ola Tørudbakken.

What changed since November

Verda operated as DataCrunch until it rebranded in November 2025, the same month it raised a $64 million Series A, according to Tech Funding News. Ten months later, the Series B is nearly three times that amount. The company says it has been cash-flow positive since a few weeks after its 2020 launch in a Helsinki garage, and that its annualized revenue run rate reached $165 million in July, up from $100 million earlier in the year, though it did not specify the exact prior date.

Founder and chief executive Ruben Bryon said in the announcement that the company's goal 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." Joe Floyd, a general partner at Emergence Capital, said "the gap between demand and supply is growing" for AI compute and that Verda has "the technology, ambition, and momentum to become a defining AI infrastructure company."

The pitch against the hyperscalers

Verda runs its own data centers in Finland and Iceland on renewable power, rather than reselling capacity from AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, and says its pricing runs as much as 90 percent below those three providers, a comparison it has not published with matched hardware or contract terms attached. Verda's customers include Nokia, humanoid-robotics company 1X, ExpressVPN and Freepik, the company says, and it holds Nvidia Preferred Partner status; its post says it expects early deployments of Nvidia's VR200 NVL72 rack-scale system, a detail the company did not attach a delivery date to.

The company says it plans to more than double its compute footprint over the next year, adding data center capacity toward a 250-plus megawatt target for 2027, and has opened offices in London and San Francisco earlier in 2026 on top of Helsinki, Taipei and its original base. Headcount has grown to more than 250 people across more than 40 countries, roughly double where it stood a year earlier.

What Verda didn't say

The company's announcement does not name a post-money valuation, only that the round clears $1 billion; it does not break out how much of the $189 million is primary capital versus secondary sales to early shareholders, a distinction Positron AI disclosed in its own tranche structure this month. Verda also has not published a benchmark or unit-economics figure to support the 90-percent pricing claim against AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. The company's next disclosed milestone is the 250-plus megawatt capacity target it has set for 2027.

Verda's rounds since 2025

1. Series A (Nov. 2025)64 $ millions
2. Series B (Sept. 2026)189 $ millions

Source: Verda company announcement, accessed 2026-09-22

Investor	Role in Series B
Emergence Capital	Lead
Supermicro	Participant
MUFG Innovation Partners	Participant
Varma Mutual Pension Insurance	Participant
Tesi (Finnish Industry Investment)	Participant

Quantum Motion's extended Series C, also announced this month, shows the same pattern among European deep-tech startups: rounds that grow or extend within months rather than closing once and waiting years for the next one.