Verda raises $189M to advance its AI cloud and expand compute capacity

Verda has pulled in $189 million to grow its AI cloud and add more compute capacity, a round the company says pushes it past a $1 billion valuation. That would make the Helsinki startup Europe’s latest unicorn, after a Series B led by Emergence Capital and backed by a mix of funds, strategics and a couple of well-known angels from Meta and Core Auto / GPUMODE.

The company, founded in 2020, is not just renting out servers. It runs a full-stack AI cloud, which means it handles the plumbing from physical data centres and hardware all the way up to its cloud platform and AI research. Verda says it serves AI workloads on demand and operates across Europe, the US and Asia. That’s a broader ambition than a simple infrastructure play, and it’s also a pretty direct answer to one of the market’s favourite complaints: there still isn’t enough compute to go around.

Verda says it has already reached a $165 million annualised revenue run rate, and it has recently opened offices in London and San Francisco. More expansion is coming across Europe, the US and Asia. The new money is meant to speed up product work across the stack, from compute capacity to platform services for AI teams.

And the company is putting a specific bet on inference, the part of AI that actually serves models in production. It also says it plans to multiply its compute capacity over the next year. That is the tell here: this round is less about a flashy logo and more about buying time, chips and rack space in a market where demand still runs ahead of supply.