Verda, an artificial intelligence infrastructure company headquartered in Helsinki, has closed a $189 million Series B funding round that was oversubscribed, alongside additional capital commitments that propelled the firm to unicorn status. Emergence Capital led the investment, joined by backers including MUFG Innovation Partners, Supermicro, Varma Mutual Pension Insurance Company, Lifeline Ventures, 6 Degrees Capital, byFounders, Tesi and several angel investors. Among the individual backers are Ola Tørudbakken from Meta and Mark Saroufim, associated with Core Auto and GPUMODE.

The company operates a comprehensive AI cloud platform that integrates physical data centres, computing hardware, cloud services and artificial intelligence research capabilities. Since its founding in 2020, Verda has established operations spanning Europe, the United States and Asia, delivering on-demand computing resources tailored for AI teams alongside inference services and research infrastructure.

Verda intends to deploy the new capital toward advancing its product across all tiers of its AI infrastructure stack, with particular focus on inference capabilities and dramatically increasing its available compute resources throughout the coming year. The company is simultaneously pursuing geographic expansion into additional markets across Europe, North America and Asia.

AI is becoming critical infrastructure across industries, and the next few years are a pivotal window for Europe. Our north star is to build the first true tech company in Europe, with AI infrastructure as the starting foundation, and to bring down the carbon footprint of compute worldwide. We're proud of our progress but are a long way from being done.

Ruben Bryon, Verda founder and CEO

The funding announcement follows Verda's achievement of a $165 million annualized revenue run rate in July. The company has recently launched offices in London and San Francisco as part of its broader international growth strategy.

Demand for AI compute is insatiable, and the gap between demand and supply is growing. Verda is moving quickly to secure and scale capacity, with the technology, ambition, and momentum to become a defining AI infrastructure company.

Joe Floyd, General Partner at Emergence Capital

Source: ArcticStartup