Verda, the Helsinki-based AI cloud company formerly known as DataCrunch, closed a $189 million Series B on September 22, 2026, lifting its valuation past $1 billion. The company said it is valued at at least $1 billion after the round, which was led by Emergence Capital, declining to disclose an exact valuation.
An oversubscribed round with a broad investor base
The oversubscribed round included participation from MUFG Innovation Partners, Supermicro, Varma Mutual Pension Insurance Company, Lifeline Ventures, ENDUR, 6 Degrees Capital, byFounders, Tesi (Finnish Industry Investment Ltd), and a group of angel investors including Ola Tørudbakken and Mark Saroufim. Tørudbakken is from Meta, and Saroufim is associated with Core Auto and GPUMODE.
The €164.8 million ($189 million) financing brings Verda’s total funding to over $450 million across equity and debt, according to the company. That makes it one of the largest single rounds ever raised by a European AI infrastructure company in this funding cycle.
From a Helsinki garage to a global GPU platform
Bryon started Verda, then called DataCrunch, from his Helsinki garage in 2020. The company is a full-stack AI cloud company that claims to manage everything from physical data centers and hardware to the cloud platform and AI research.
Verda raised a $13 million seed round in 2024 and a $64 million Series A in 2025. In April 2026, Verda announced another $117 million equity-and-debt package, later expanded to $155 million with financing from Nordic Investment Bank.
The September Series B nearly doubles that previous tranche in a single close, reflecting the accelerating pace of capital deployment in the AI infrastructure sector, a dynamic also evident in the GPU factory qualification push that has gripped the industry this year.
Verda now powers AI workloads for organizations across more than 50 countries, ranging from early-stage startups to enterprises, and reached a $165 million annualized revenue run rate as of July 2026, with a team of more than 250 people spread across Helsinki, London, Taipei and San Francisco.
What the capital is built to do
The new capital will help Verda scale the layers of the stack that cutting-edge AI teams rely on for growth, expanding physical compute capacity while building out platform services and tools for the agentic era.
Verda must secure accelerators, data centers, networking equipment and power before customers can consume the resulting capacity, meaning software margins may arrive later while the hardware bill arrives first.
Verda’s customers include Nokia, 1X, Freepik and ExpressVPN.
The round arrives at a moment when investor appetite for AI infrastructure shows no sign of cooling. The broader race for data center dominance has reshaped the competitive map for compute providers, and Verda’s unicorn crossing positions the company as Europe’s most heavily backed independent GPU cloud to date.
A European alternative to hyperscale clouds
Bryon started the business after running into the same frustrations many AI developers face: cloud infrastructure from the big providers was too expensive, too complex, and not designed with AI workloads in mind. Verda’s pitch has been to offer a full-stack alternative that lets AI developers provision GPU clusters without the overhead and lock-in of the dominant hyperscalers.
The financing, reported by Bloomberg on September 22, underscores continued investor appetite for the infrastructure powering the artificial intelligence boom. Verda has raised over €392.3 million ($450 million) in total funding and gains a runway to build out data center footprint across Europe at a time when sovereign AI ambitions and data-residency requirements are nudging enterprise buyers toward regional alternatives.
Whether Verda can convert its self-reported revenue run rate into durable, high-utilization demand will determine how far its unicorn valuation holds as the GPU supply glut debate intensifies across the sector.
