While many Silicon Valley AI infrastructure companies are quickly spending money to grow, a Finnish startup has quietly built a profitable GPU cloud and is now reaching out to customers.
Verda, an AI cloud infrastructure company based in Helsinki that was formerly known as DataCrunch, has raised $117 million to accelerate its growth. The funding round was led by Lifeline Ventures, with byFounders, Tesi, and Varma also joining in. Nordic financial institutions provided additional debt financing.
The startup, founded in 2020 by Ruben Bryon, focuses on vertical integration. Unlike most cloud competitors that rent GPU capacity and resell it with additional software, Verda manages everything itself, including servers, data centres, networking, and AI developer tools.
Verda’s infrastructure in Finland gives it an advantage over competitors in places like Frankfurt or Virginia. Its data centres use only renewable energy and natural cooling, which lowers operating costs.
Verda is also one of a few NVIDIA Preferred Partners worldwide, which gives it priority access to GPUs at a time when securing sufficient computing power remains hard for enterprise AI teams. Its customers include Nokia, 1X, ExpressVPN, and Freepik.
The company aims to fill the gap between large cloud providers, where buying capacity is slow, and pricing is unclear, and basic GPU rentals that offer little support. Verda’s AI Lab team works directly with customers and uses their feedback to improve its products.
This strategy puts Verda in direct competition with CoreWeave, Lambda Labs, and other cloud providers. Verda stands out by focusing on profitability, clean energy, and European data sovereignty, which is especially important as some European companies find it harder to work with US cloud giants.
The $117 million will help Verda launch in the UK and US this year, expand into Asia, and hire more than 100 new employees.
