Verda raises $189M Series B to expand AI cloud and compute capacity, becomes Europe's newest unicorn
The AMW Read
Verda's $189M round and >$1B valuation mark a meaningful European neo-cloud milestone amid an explicit compute supply-demand signal, but the round falls short of a structural capital-cycle threshold.
Verda raises $189M Series B to expand AI cloud and compute capacity, becomes Europe's newest unicorn
Helsinki-based Verda, formerly known as DataCrunch, closed an oversubscribed $189 million Series B led by Emergence Capital, with participation from MUFG Innovation Partners, Supermicro, Varma Mutual Pension Insurance Company, Tesi, and angel investors including Meta's Ola Tørudbakken and Mark Saroufim of Core Auto and GPUMODE. The round brings total funding above $450 million and pushes Verda's valuation past $1 billion, making it Europe's newest unicorn. The company runs a full-stack AI cloud — data centers, hardware, platform, and AI research — serving on-demand AI compute across Europe, the US, and Asia, and reached a $165 million annualized revenue run rate in July.
The raise lands amid a persistent AI compute supply-demand gap: Emergence Capital's Joe Floyd said demand for AI compute continues to outpace available supply, the dynamic fueling neo-cloud funding globally as GPU capacity remains the binding constraint on training and inference. Verda's stack-spanning approach — data centers through cloud platform and research — positions it as a European counterweight to US neo-clouds and hyperscalers, with new London and San Francisco offices signaling expansion beyond its Nordic base. Per the AI Market Watch index, which tracks roughly 5,000 companies rather than a full census, Verda was already logged under its earlier DataCrunch name.
For builders, Verda's plan to invest in inference and multiply compute capacity over the next year signals a shift in GPU allocation priorities toward production serving, not just training. For investors, a $1 billion-plus valuation on a $165 million revenue run rate is a rare public data point for benchmarking neo-cloud revenue multiples outside the US majors.