Finland’s Verda Becomes a Unicorn With €161 Million for Europe’s Next Neocloud

Helsinki-based Verda has crossed into unicorn territory after closing a $189 million Series B, or about €161 million. The raise values the AI cloud provider at more than $1 billion and pushes it deeper into a European market that’s suddenly getting very crowded.

The company’s pitch is simple enough: sell GPU capacity for AI training and inference, keep the data in Europe, and undercut the big American clouds on price. Verda runs its own data centers in Finland and says they’re powered by renewable energy. It also layers software on top of the hardware, which is where the margin story usually gets more interesting, at least in theory.

Emergence Capital led the round. Backers also include MUFG Innovation Partners, Supermicro, Varma, Lifeline Ventures, 6 Degrees Capital, byFounders, Tesi and a group of angels that includes Ola Tørudbakken and Mark Saroufim. Verda says the round was oversubscribed, though it didn’t say how the money was split. Total capital raised across equity and debt is now above $450 million, after a €100 million round earlier this year, plus a €12 million seed and a €55 million Series A.

The spending plans are as ambitious as the valuation. Verda says it wants to expand its own data centers, fill them with hardware and keep building the platform above them. It says more than 250 megawatts will be in operation in 2027, with capacity already live in Finland and more sites planned in Europe, the UK, the US and Asia. The company also expects early deployments of Nvidia’s upcoming VR200 NVL72 generation in the coming months.

The product roadmap is aimed squarely at the messy, everyday side of AI infrastructure. Verda wants to speed up provisioning, add S3-compatible object storage, offer managed Kubernetes and deepen enterprise features like audit logs, single sign-on and confidential computing. SOC Type II and C5 certifications are part of the sales pitch for bigger corporate buyers, while a dedicated AI Lab keeps working on compilers, serving software and kernel optimization.

Verda says its annualized revenue run rate for July 2026 is $165 million, or roughly €141 million, up from about $100 million at the start of the year. It employs more than 250 people across Helsinki, London, Taipei and San Francisco, and says it serves customers in over 50 countries. Named users include Aleph Alpha, Magnific and Epsilon Health.

But the real story is that Verda is entering a brutal business just as it gets fashionable. Nebius is already public, Nscale is heading for a New York listing, and Mistral is building its own cloud layer on top of model sales. The European argument is still the same old one: local data, lower prices, less dependence on the US giants. The bill for all that still comes due in GPUs, power and concrete.