Verda raises $189M Series B, becomes Europe's newest unicorn

Verda, a Finnish operator of AI cloud infrastructure and data centres, has raised $189 million in an oversubscribed Series B led by Emergence Capital. The company says the round makes it Europe's latest unicorn and brings total funding across equity and debt to more than $450 million.

Investors and the approach

Joining Emergence Capital are MUFG Innovation Partners, Supermicro, Varma Mutual Pension Insurance Company, Lifeline Ventures, 6 Degrees Capital, byFounders and Tesi (Finnish Industry Investment Ltd), plus angel investors including Ola Tørudbakken and Mark Saroufim. Verda designs and builds its own data centres, the infrastructure inside them and the platform on top, aiming to give customers capacity where and when they need it at a lower carbon footprint than the industry average. Founder and CEO Ruben Bryon said the window to build "one of the defining compute companies of this generation, and to do so from Europe" will not stay open for long.

Customers and scale

Verda says it now powers AI workloads for organisations in more than 50 countries and reached a $165 million annualised revenue run rate in July 2026, with more than 250 employees across Helsinki, London, Taipei and San Francisco. Aleph Alpha runs R&D infrastructure on Verda GPU clusters with engineers-in-residence working on the software stack; Magnific serves millions of media-generation requests per day; and Epsilon Health trains radiology AI models on a dedicated cluster at native image resolution.

What the funding is for

On capacity, Verda expects more than 250 MW of operations in 2027, with data centre capacity live in Finland today and more sites due in Europe, the UK, the US and Asia, plus early deployments of NVIDIA VR200 NVL72 systems. On the platform side it lists a recently released container registry, an S3-compatible object storage in the pipeline, pre-configured Kubernetes with Kueue or Slurm via Slinky in Instant clusters, and Managed Kubernetes as the next release. For enterprises, it points to Audit Logs and SSO for IAM, confidential computing support for 8× NVIDIA HGX B300 and B200, and SOC Type II and C5 certifications.

Why it matters

The bet is that the procurement model of recent years — long negotiations and fixed allocations — no longer fits training, production inference and agentic workloads that spike when a tool call returns. Verda's internal AI Lab runs research workloads on the same platform customers use, working on GPU utilisation, inference optimisation and kernel engineering.