Verda (Finland) raises $189M in Series B

Verda (Finland) raises $189M in Series B verda.com

Verda has raised $189 million in new funding, led by Emergence Capital, to accelerate its full-stack AI cloud, from data centre capacity to large-scale serving.

88 points•cmrdporcupine•9 days ago•52 comments•

#verda #189m #finland #raises 189m #led #raised #funding #million

52 comments

herodoturtle9 days ago

Sincere congrats to the Verda team :-)

Can someone please help me understand what their competitive advantage is, versus the likes of AWS / Azure et al, who are also available in the EU.

I love a good underdog story, but I'm not understanding the economics of it.

traceroute668 days ago

> AWS / Azure et al, who are also available in the EU

Because US-in-EU is fake-EU.

CLOUD act, PATRIOT act etc. etc. US headquarters doesn't escape the arm of US law.

Remember a long time ago there was a famous case where Microsoft fought the US DoJ when they came looking for somebody's data in Azure Ireland ?

That was then. Now is now. Do you honestly think Microsoft would put up the same fight today, especially if the US President decided to lean on them ? I don't !

CLOUD/PATRIOT etc. has gone from a theoretical risk to a real one. And now you have a US President in office who doesn't care much for bypassing all that anyway.

graemep8 days ago

Is it a risk anyone cares about? There is very little actual switching. In many ways dependence is increasing as everything moves to apps (including the EU's own age verification app) that only run on US controlled devices.

_ink_9 days ago

Cloud Act: The CLOUD Act (Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act) is a U.S. federal law passed in 2018 that allows U.S. law enforcement to compel U.S.-based tech and cloud companies to hand over customer data, even if that data is stored on servers located outside the United States

petcat9 days ago

The data sovereignty stuff is mostly just lip-service. Both the EU and Canada are in the process of negotiating reciprocal CLOUD Act arrangements with the US government similar to what UK and Australia already have in place.

> EU-US agreement [1]

> Negotiations with the United States to facilitate cross-border access to e-evidence for judicial cooperation in criminal matters started in September 2019 and are currently ongoing. At present, US-based service providers collaborate with European law enforcement authorities through direct cooperation on a voluntary basis or through mutual legal assistance (MLA) procedures.

[1] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/e-evidence/

133249 days ago

There are several regulated industries that need to have their computing done in the EU without ties to US companies. Sovereignty is currently a big political topic.

koonsolo8 days ago

It's a bit sad that the only responses you get is "It's based in EU". If that's the only thing, it's not really impressive is it?

Don't get me wrong, as a European I'm all for EU, but we should offer products and services that are at least as good as abroad competitors. My company still relies heavily on US tech, for the simple fact that lots of it is plain better and/or cheaper.

Ruben-8 days ago

I entirely agree - and we're not aiming to build the eleventh shitty Eurocloud.

We aim at building a platform that wins on product first and foremost. Some areas where we are good/great/best in class globally vs. hyperscalers and other neoclouds: - End-to-end automated clusters (great) - GPU VM setup time (best in class) - Confidential Compute on high end GPU infra (great, only one offering this by default afaik) - Kernel development support (best in class) - we have NVIDIA themselves using our platform for kernel development. Some exciting products coming out soon (tm). - Customer support (good/great) Might sound lame but have you tried AWS as a sub 10M revenue customer?

Working hard on some hard engineering problems which will make this list longer!

Zigurd8 days ago

The economics of it are the same as for Hetzner. AWS is trying to split the difference by offering services that are supposedly run exclusively by EU citizens, from data centers located in the EU. The reasoning is pretty solid for at least the next two or three years. It might take another five to restore trust in US tech. Not a bad amount of runway.

nik7369 days ago

Verda is great! The only thing bad about Verda is that it's sold out fairly often :-) So the $189M will hopefully help with that.

Ruben-8 days ago

It will, working on bringing much more infra to the on-demand cloud platform. What kind of infra and future services are most important?

purpleidea8 days ago

I'd love to give someone at Verda a demo of https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/ to show them how they could actually do fast provisioning and automation. Seeing Ansible+Kubernetes+K* stuff in their jobs offering does not inspire confidence that they're innovating in building their core infra. You can't out-compete AWS or even the smaller clouds there.

If you want to see a different perspective, lmk.

Ruben-8 days ago

Sent an e-mail, looking forward to learn more

purpleidea8 days ago

I've sent you some info! If it blows your mind, tell some friends here =D

paperboy100009 days ago

Excellent news for European tech stack - congrats!

welhoilija9 days ago

Gongratulations to the team! Their solutions not only allow the data to actually stay in the EU, but are otherwise competetive as well!

huksley9 days ago

Could you clarify what you mean? Cloud-related data stay in the EU, but yeah, marketing/payment stack are more diverse.

Disclaimer: I work at Verda.

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