Verda (Finland) raises $189M in Series B

Posted by cmrdporcupine 18 hours ago

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Comments

Comment by herodoturtle 15 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.

Comment by traceroute66 13 hours 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.

Comment by graemep 13 hours 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.

Comment by luplex 12 hours ago

I work in a European government institution. This is definitely a risk we care about, and we would switch to sovereign clouds in a heartbeat if we had any good ones in Europe.

Comment by traceroute66 12 hours ago

> if we had any good ones in Europe

TBF (and the subject of government tech and procurement aside) there are good ones in Europe.

The problem tends to be how much of the US-cloud cool-aid your organisation has drunk.

If you've drunk the whole bottle, i.e. the random alphabet-soup of interdependent microservices, then sure you'll have a tough time finding a like-for-like equivalent.

But if you've still got old-school IT brains in your IT team, then its perfectly feasible to find equivalence in Europe.

Not only that, but you'll probably pay at least 10x less in Europe because you're not paying through the nose for the alphabet-soup of random interdependency.

Also the EU providers price sheets are clear and it is easy to reliably forecast how much you will be paying. As opposed to the US provider's muddy price sheets full of small-print and all sorts of random invented proprietary billing units that are nigh on impossible to reason about.

Comment by graemep 12 hours ago

Are you also going to switch your end user devices, or are you going to remain reliant on Google, Apple and Microsoft? The data flows through those.

Do other institutions care? Some people and some institutions do, but how many?

What about the private sector? Even if you moved all government services entirely away from the US, your economy can still be reliant on American suppliers and communications between the government and the private sector and individuals will too.

> we would switch to sovereign clouds in a heartbeat if we had any good ones in Europe.

What is wrong with the options you have in Europe? That comment suggests to me you do not care enough to do anything that takes effort.

Comment by koonsolo 12 hours ago

> if we had any good ones in Europe

So you basically confirmed that being located in Europe isn't enough.

Comment by bulbar 8 hours ago

Wero begs to differ.

Comment by toomuchtodo 11 hours ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49225112 (subthread with citations of switching)

Comment by _ink_ 14 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

Comment by petcat 14 hours 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/

Comment by graemep 13 hours ago

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

Comment by flipped 13 hours ago

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Comment by 13324 15 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.

Comment by itkovian_ 7 hours ago

Well I mean Verda is significantly cheaper than the hyperscalars for the exact same device so that’s one thing.

Maybe one argument could be there’s very little value added services required over the raw compute in this new world, and they’re structurally setup to capitalise on that whereas hyperscalars are not.

Comment by Zigurd 13 hours 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.

Comment by Ruben- 7 hours ago

Thanks! Wrote a reply to one of the replies here to elaborate on exactly that.

Comment by victorbjorklund 14 hours ago

They ain’t Americans.

Comment by bergheim 15 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

Comment by koonsolo 12 hours 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.

Comment by Ruben- 7 hours 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!

Comment by nik736 16 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.

Comment by Ruben- 7 hours 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?

Comment by purpleidea 11 hours 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.

Comment by Ruben- 9 hours ago

Sent an e-mail, looking forward to learn more

Comment by purpleidea 6 hours ago

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

Comment by paperboy10000 16 hours ago

Excellent news for European tech stack - congrats!

Comment by welhoilija 14 hours ago

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

Comment by huksley 14 hours 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.

Comment by petcat 16 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?

Comment by Ruben- 6 hours ago

The best open source models are Chinese, and you've got to start somewhere. Having distribution in place first helps us get the resources to do grander things tomorrow.

Comment by impossiblefork 15 hours ago

That's a real risk.

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

Comment by lifty 15 hours ago

Can you buy these already? I think not.

Comment by impossiblefork 15 hours ago

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

The Euclyd machines, probably many months away.

Comment by ohisthatso 12 hours ago

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Comment by ksimukka 13 hours ago

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

Comment by Ruben- 6 hours ago

We have offices in London, Palo Alto and Taiwan too and quite a lot of remote people. What's your background/interest?

Comment by redanddead 12 hours ago

Awesome city

Comment by 13 hours ago

Comment by BiraIgnacio 15 hours ago

This is wonderful, congrats to everyone at Verda!

Comment by Ruben- 6 hours ago

Thanks on behalf of everyone at Verda!

Comment by robotswantdata 15 hours ago

Very good dev experience! Congrats

Comment by Ruben- 6 hours ago

Awesome to hear, thx

Comment by htrp 16 hours ago

yet another ai cloud

Comment by Ruben- 6 hours ago

And yet we believe we can build something special. Maybe only due to being naive enough, but we started bootstrapped 6 years ago.

Comment by dude250711 16 hours ago

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

Comment by Ruben- 6 hours ago

Verda, the best Eurocloud after OVH and Scaleway! In all ernest the lacking service of those platforms was a big driver to focus on beating others in product, highlighted some of our defining differences above in some reply.

Comment by hndhyc0bdt 16 hours ago

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Comment by ivyBadger920 16 hours ago

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Comment by hnx0rqy49u 15 hours ago

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Comment by mrits 16 hours ago

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

Comment by kryptiskt 14 hours ago

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

Comment by Ruben- 6 hours ago

Now we can hire that guy!

Comment by hn45e7pbij 16 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.

Comment by Ruben- 6 hours ago

That's why we're building