Verda (Finland) raises $189M in Series B

ksimukka•4 minutes ago

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

herodoturtle•about 2 hours 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_•about 2 hours 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•36 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•about 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•33 minutes ago

They ain’t Americans.

bergheim•about 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

nik736•about 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•about 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•37 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.

paperboy10000•about 3 hours ago

Excellent news for European tech stack - congrats!

petcat•about 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•about 2 hours ago

That's a real risk.

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

lifty•about 2 hours ago

Can you buy these already? I think not.

impossiblefork•about 2 hours ago

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

The Euclyd machines, probably many months away.

BiraIgnacio•about 2 hours ago

This is wonderful, congrats to everyone at Verda!

robotswantdata•about 2 hours ago

Very good dev experience! Congrats

htrp•about 3 hours ago

yet another ai cloud

dude250711•about 3 hours ago

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

mrits•about 3 hours ago

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

kryptiskt•about 1 hour ago

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

hn45e7pbij•about 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.

Verda (Finland) raises $189M in Series B

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