The Helsinki-based company, formerly DataCrunch, is backed by Lifeline Ventures, byFounders, Tesi, Varma, and a group of Nordic lenders. It is already cash-flow positive, holds Nvidia Preferred Partner status, and plans to hire more than 100 people this year.
Verda, the Helsinki-based AI cloud infrastructure company formerly known as DataCrunch, has raised $117 million in new funding. The round comprises equity led by Lifeline Ventures, with participation from byFounders, Tesi, and Varma, alongside debt financing from a group of Nordic financial institutions.
The company will use the capital to accelerate product development, expand into the UK, the US, and Asia, and hire more than 100 people by the end of the year. CEO and founder Ruben Bryon said the company is “seeing very strong momentum” and intends to “double down on development and accelerate expansion.”
The round is notable for what it says about Verda’s financial position as much as for its size. The company is already cash-flow positive, with an annualised revenue run rate that doubled to over $60 million during the first quarter of 2026.
For a six-year-old startup in a capital-intensive infrastructure market where most competitors are burning through VC money on GPU leases and data centre builds, operational profitability at this stage is unusual.
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It means the $117 million is expansion fuel, not survival capital, a distinction that matters when evaluating the company’s position relative to better-funded but less profitable rivals.
Verda’s product is vertically integrated AI cloud infrastructure: the company handles everything from the physical servers and data centres to the tools and services developers use to build and deploy AI.
Its data centres in Finland run on 100% renewable energy, drawing on the Nordic region’s structural advantages in cheap hydroelectric and wind power and natural cooling efficiency.
This positions the company at the intersection of two growing enterprise demands: AI compute capacity and decarbonised infrastructure. Its customer list spans Nokia, 1X, ExpressVPN, and Freepik.
Verda holds Nvidia Preferred Partner status, placing it among a select group of cloud providers with privileged access to Nvidia’s latest GPU hardware. The funding history shows a company that has scaled quickly through successive rounds.
The seed round was $13 million; the Series A was $64 million, raised in January 2026, led by byFounders with participation from Skaala, Varma, and Tesi, and including debt financing from Nordea, Armada Credit Partners, Danske Bank, Norion Bank, and LocalTapiola.
The new $117 million round represents a near-doubling of total capital raised in a single step. Lifeline Ventures, one of Finland’s most prominent early-stage funds with a portfolio including Supercell, takes the lead in this round, replacing byFounders in the lead position though byFounders continues to participate.
The company rebranded from DataCrunch to Verda in November 2025, signalling a shift in positioning from a GPU compute provider to a broader AI cloud platform.
The rebrand coincided with the Series A announcement and a more explicit European sovereign cloud narrative: DataCrunch had framed itself as the alternative to US hyperscalers for GDPR-compliant AI workloads, outside the reach of the US Cloud Act.
That positioning remains, but the Verda branding reflects a wider ambition, expansion into the US market, which the company is now targeting with this round, means competing directly with AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud on their home territory rather than purely offering European data residency as a differentiator.
The embedded AI Lab team, which works directly with customers and feeds insights back into product development, is the element of the model that most distinguishes Verda from pure infrastructure providers.
In a market where GPU cloud platforms are increasingly commoditised at the hardware layer, the ability to help customers extract value from that compute, through model optimisation, inference tuning, and direct engineering support, is a meaningful commercial differentiator.
Whether that advantage is durable at the scale Verda is targeting in the US depends on whether a Helsinki-based team can match the proximity and speed of response that US-based rivals can offer enterprise customers on the ground.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
