Verda, a Finnish AI cloud company, said on 22 September 2026 that it had raised $189m, about €165m, in an oversubscribed Series B led by Emergence Capital of San Francisco12. The round takes its total funding past $450m across equity and debt and its valuation above $1bn.
Two Finnish institutions confirmed their own participation. Tesi, the state investment company, says it first backed the firm in 2025 and has followed it through several rounds3. Varma, a mutual pension insurer, disclosed more than €50m and says it remains a significant owner4.
The Finnish Trade Register records the business under number 2886809-8, registered on 25 January 2018 and domiciled in Helsinki. It shows the legal name changing from DataCrunch Oy to Verda Cloud Oy on 16 January 2026, with DataCrunch kept as a trading name5. The rename was announced on 5 November 2025 and phased in6. Verda's own timeline dates the founding to 2020, two years after the register entry.
The company says it reached a $165m annualised revenue run rate in July 2026 and employs more than 250 people across Helsinki, London, Taipei and San Francisco. Its own documentation lists three data centres, all in Helsinki, and it says it will have more than 250MW of operations in 202717.
That target is the part worth watching. Bruegel argued this month that capital is not what holds European compute back, and that permitting is, putting German data centres at 42 months from permit to operation against 24 in the United States. Verda has raised a large cheque led by an American firm to build European megawatts. The money buys hardware and sites. It does not buy a grid connection, and the distance between three halls in Helsinki and 250MW runs through a planning authority.
Two claims in the announcement rest on Verda alone. It says its GPU clusters run Aleph Alpha's research and development infrastructure, which would put the German lab now folding into Cohere on Finnish compute. Neither Aleph Alpha nor Cohere has said so.
Verda also lists Supermicro among its investors, while Supermicro's own announcements describe a hardware partnership with Verda and do not mention an investment8. Investors do not always announce themselves, so that is a gap in the record rather than a contradiction.
