YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Verda (Finland) raises $189M in Series B

68 points cmrdporcupine 4 hours ago 24 comments

htrp 3 hours ago | parent

yet another ai cloud

dude250711 2 hours ago | parent

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

nik736 3 hours ago | parent

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.

paperboy10000 3 hours ago | parent

Excellent news for European tech stack - congrats!

mrits 3 hours ago | parent

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

kryptiskt 57 minutes ago | parent

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

petcat 2 hours ago | parent

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 | parent

That's a real risk.

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

lifty 2 hours ago | parent

Can you buy these already? I think not.

impossiblefork 2 hours ago | parent

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

The Euclyd machines, probably many months away.

hn45e7pbij 2 hours ago | parent

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.

robotswantdata 2 hours ago | parent

Very good dev experience! Congrats

herodoturtle 1 hour ago | parent

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.

13324 1 hour ago | parent

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.

bergheim 1 hour ago | parent

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

_ink_ 1 hour ago | parent

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 47 minutes ago | parent

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/

victorbjorklund 45 minutes ago | parent

They ain’t Americans.

BiraIgnacio 1 hour ago | parent

This is wonderful, congrats to everyone at Verda!

welhoilija 1 hour ago | parent

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

huksley 48 minutes ago | parent

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.

ksimukka 16 minutes ago | parent

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