Finnish cloud startup Verda raises €100 million to take on Amazon and Microsoft
Finnish cloud startup Verda says it is already profitable. That alone sets it apart from most of its rivals.
Text by Martti Asikainen, 5.5.2026 | Photo by Adobe Stock Photos
Verda, a Finnish artificial intelligence cloud company founded in 2020, has closed a funding round worth €100 million ($117 million), which is one of the largest raises in Northern Europe’s technology sector this year. According to Verda it is already generating positive operating cash flow, an unusual position for a capital-intensive infrastructure startup at this stage of growth.
The round combines equity and debt. The equity portion was led by Lifeline Ventures, with participation from byFounders, Tesi, the Finnish state-owned investment company, and Varma, a Finnish pension fund. Debt financing came from a group of Nordic financial institutions.
The company, which rebranded from DataCrunch in November 2025, provides developers and organisations with on-demand access to high-performance GPUs , the computing hardware used to train and run AI systems.
It positions itself as faster, cheaper, and more privacy-friendly than Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. The company claims customers can save up to 90 per cent compared to the major hyperscalers; the figure is Verda’s own and has not been independently verified.
What the money is for
Verda plans to hire more than 100 employees by the end of this year and expand into the United States, the United Kingdom, and Asia. The company has signalled plans to open offices in California and extend its data centre footprint into Sweden, supplementing its existing facilities in Finland.
“We are building the next generation of AI cloud infrastructure for pioneering teams around the world,” said Ruben Bryon, the company’s founder and chief executive. “This funding enables us to intensify our development and accelerate our expansion in Europe, the US, and Asia.”
The raise brings Verda’s total funding to approximately €170 million. It follows a €12 million seed round in 2024 and a €55 million Series A closed in September 2025. Notably, Dealroom, the investment data firm, reported that the Series A was deployed within approximately four months as demand for compute capacity surged — a detail that raises questions about how far the latest round will stretch. The company’s annualised revenue run rate more than doubled in the first quarter of 2026, reaching over €51.3 million ($60 million), according to Verda.
The company is vertically integrated, managing its full technology stack from physical servers and data centres to the software tools used by AI teams, rather than renting GPU capacity from third parties. It holds Nvidia Preferred Partner status, giving it preferential access to Nvidia’s latest hardware, a meaningful advantage when demand for AI compute consistently outstrips supply. Customers include Nokia, ExpressVPN, and Freepik.
The sovereignty argument
Verda’s data centres are located in Finland and powered, the company says, entirely by renewable energy — wind, hydroelectric, and nuclear. It argues that Finland’s climate, combined with liquid cooling technology, allows it to operate with lower energy consumption than facilities in warmer locations.
Increasingly, Verda frames its pitch around data sovereignty. The US Cloud Act allows American authorities to compel US cloud companies to hand over data regardless of where it is physically stored — a concern that has made European companies in regulated sectors wary of relying on US-based providers, and one that Verda argues infrastructure legally governed within the EU can sidestep.
In December 2025, Verda partnered with Finnish technology company Siili Solutions to launch LLM Gateway, a service offering access to large language models with GDPR-compliant, Finland-hosted data processing. The product targets regulated sectors including finance, healthcare, and government.
Expanding into the United States puts Verda in direct competition not only with AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, but with well-capitalised specialist rivals including CoreWeave and Lambda Labs, both of which have raised billions of dollars and built large-scale GPU infrastructure in recent years.
Verda’s cost advantages — rooted in clean Nordic energy and direct hardware ownership — may be harder to sustain on US soil, where those rivals can offer faster on-the-ground support and where the sovereignty argument carries less commercial weight.
