€100m in fresh debt and equity puts Verda, the Helsinki-based cloud provider formerly known as Datacrunch, on a path to challenge American hyperscalers on their home turf and beyond.

Lifeline Ventures led the round, with byFounders, Tesi, and Finnish pension insurer Varma joining on the equity side. A group of Nordic financial institutions provided the debt portion. The company has now raised roughly €170m since inception.

Verda sells GPU-powered cloud infrastructure for AI training and inference. It is vertically integrated, owning the stack from physical hardware through to the application layer. The company operates data centers in Finland and Iceland and keeps an office in London.

The new capital will fund expansion into the US and Asia. CEO and founder Ruben Bryon told Sifted the company plans to open offices in California and Asia, while beginning construction on larger sites in Sweden.

"We are purposefully dedicating our efforts towards building a platform that caters to that paradigm shift," Bryon said, referring to AI agents that now procure compute programmatically rather than through human sales conversations.

Growth and Sovereignty

Verda says it is cash-flow positive. Revenue run rate doubled to more than $60m during the first quarter of 2026, according to the company. The €55m it raised in September lasted only until January because customer demand for compute outstripped supply.

Europe's push for tech sovereignty is a tailwind. Governments and enterprises across the continent increasingly want compute that does not route through Anthropic, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud. Bryon said Verda intends to remain headquartered in Europe rather than redomicile in Delaware, positioning neutrality as a selling point beyond the region.

"Not being a US company is quite important," he said.

The market is getting crowded. Nscale, Crusoe, and Lambda all compete for AI cloud workloads, though each targets a slightly different slice of the stack. Verda's pitch rests on vertical integration and a European legal home.

The company employs more than 100 people and plans to hire another 100, with a focus on hardware engineering and AI research. Verda maintains an internal AI lab that works directly with customers and feeds insights back into product development.

Construction timelines for the Swedish sites and a firm date for the California office have not been disclosed.