Verda (Finland) raises $189M in Series B

(verda.com)

64 points | by cmrdporcupine 4 hours ago

13 comments

  • nik736 2 hours 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.
  • welhoilija 50 minutes ago
    Gongratulations to the team! Their solutions not only allow the data to actually stay in the EU, but are otherwise competetive as well!
    • huksley 25 minutes 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.

  • herodoturtle 1 hour 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.

    • _ink_ 1 hour 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
      • petcat 24 minutes 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/

    • 13324 1 hour 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.
    • victorbjorklund 21 minutes ago
      They ain’t Americans.
    • bergheim 1 hour ago
      Them putting services in EU (even as subsidiaries) is just a marketing strategy where they are straight up lying to customers so they can get more money.

      See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act

  • paperboy10000 2 hours ago
    Excellent news for European tech stack - congrats!
  • petcat 2 hours ago
    AI cloud? I guess 189 mil will buy nvidia GPUs to host inference for Chinese models for Europeans? Is that what this is?
    • impossiblefork 2 hours ago
      That's a real risk.

      Hopefully it's for buying VSORA or Euclyd machines, but well...

      • lifty 1 hour ago
        Can you buy these already? I think not.
        • impossiblefork 1 hour ago
          The VSORA machines, possibly. They are apparently delivered and being installed at Scaleway.

          The Euclyd machines, probably many months away.

  • BiraIgnacio 1 hour ago
    This is wonderful, congrats to everyone at Verda!
  • robotswantdata 2 hours ago
    Very good dev experience! Congrats
  • htrp 3 hours ago
    yet another ai cloud
    • dude250711 2 hours ago
      Yeah, but this time like... In EU!
  • hndhyc0bdt 3 hours ago
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  • ivyBadger920 2 hours ago
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  • hnx0rqy49u 1 hour ago
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  • mrits 2 hours ago
    $198M for AI Cloud when US has a company that pays one of it's employees about that?
    • kryptiskt 34 minutes ago
      That American AI companies waste money like that is a good argument for them being vulnerable to leaner companies.
  • hn45e7pbij 2 hours ago
    Yeah the sold out bit is telling, and it's rarely the cards, it's finding racks with enough power and cooling ready to take them.