Verda (Finland) raises $189M in Series B

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.

traceroute66 17 minutes 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.

graemep 10 minutes 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_ 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 1 hour 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/

graemep 12 minutes ago | | |

Verda's own website is sitting behind Cloudflare! So is consilium.europa.eu! The dependence is pervasive.

Zigurd 16 minutes 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.

13324 2 hours 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 1 hour ago | |

They ain’t Americans.

bergheim 2 hours 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

ksimukka 31 minutes ago |

If only I was in Helsinki. This would be an interesting time to work in this area.

nik736 3 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 1 hour 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 1 hour 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.

paperboy10000 3 hours ago |

Excellent news for European tech stack - congrats!

petcat 3 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 2 hours ago | | |

Can you buy these already? I think not.

impossiblefork 2 hours ago | | |

The VSORA machines, possibly. They are apparently delivered and being installed at Scaleway.

The Euclyd machines, probably many months away.

BiraIgnacio 2 hours 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 3 hours ago | |

Yeah, but this time like... In EU!

mrits 3 hours ago |

$198M for AI Cloud when US has a company that pays one of it's employees about that?

kryptiskt 1 hour ago | |

That American AI companies waste money like that is a good argument for them being vulnerable to leaner companies.

hn45e7pbij 3 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.