€22m · Debt · Deeptech · Helsinki, Finland
Verda, the Helsinki-based AI cloud company formerly known as DataCrunch, has secured a four-year €22m loan from the Nordic Investment Bank. NIB says the InvestEU-backed facility will finance graphics processors plus related networking and storage equipment for new high-performance servers, deployed primarily in data centres in Finland.
The lender estimates the wider infrastructure project at about €132m, including financing from multiple institutions. Verda’s own announcement places NIB inside a broader funding package that grew from $117m (€100m) to $155m (€136m), combining equity led by Lifeline Ventures with debt from Nordic lenders. This brief covers the €22m NIB loan specifically rather than treating that entire package as a second new round.
Hardware finance meets on-demand AI cloud demand
Verda operates a vertically integrated AI cloud: it combines data-centre capacity and GPU hardware with self-service instances, clusters, serverless containers and managed inference endpoints. The company argues that giving developers immediate access to compute can replace long procurement cycles and bespoke capacity negotiations. In its April financing announcement, Verda said customers included 1X, Nokia, ExpressVPN and Freepik, and that its Finnish data centres ran on 100% renewable energy.
The structure of the new loan matches that capital-intensive model. GPUs, networking and storage are long-lived assets that can support many customer workloads, while a four-year facility gives Verda time to bring the capacity online and sell it. The commercial test is utilisation: hardware creates revenue only when customers keep it busy, so provisioning speed, reliability and access to current accelerator generations matter alongside the size of the fleet.
There was evidence of demand before the NIB financing. In June, Verda reported a $100m revenue run rate, up tenfold in 18 months, and said it employed more than 130 people. Those are company-reported figures, but they help explain why the business is financing additional capacity rather than only software development.
Capacity is the operating milestone
NIB says the project will add high-performance computing capacity in Finland and strengthen European digital infrastructure. That gives the financing a policy objective as well as a commercial one: more locally operated compute can reduce reliance on non-European providers. For Verda, however, the milestone is operational. The loan funds equipment; it does not prove that the new servers are deployed or generating revenue. Execution depends on installing the infrastructure, making it reliably available and converting demand into sustained paid usage.
