Founding Designer

Ando, a team messaging platform designed for humans and AI agents to collaborate, has raised pre-seed and seed funding. The pre-seed round was led by Accel, whilst the seed round was led by Index and Emergence. Founded by Sara Du, a Thiel Fellow who previously founded Alloy Automation, Ando addresses the growing complexity of coordinating AI agents in the workplace. The platform allows teams to work with multiple agents in one shared environment, where context carries across conversations. Unlike traditional messaging platforms built for human-to-human communication, Ando enables agents to participate in conversations and take action alongside human teammates. The system learns from each interaction, making agents more aligned and proactive over time. The platform is now opening up to more teams.

Helsinki's Verda becomes Europe's newest AI cloud unicorn after $189M raise. September 22, 2026 * Verda has raised $189 million, led by Emergence Capital, which brings its valuation to over $1 billion. * The company currently has more than $450 million in total funding and states that it is cash-flow positive. * Verda states that its services can be up to 90% cheaper than those of AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. In 2020, Ruben Bryon built his first server rack in a garage in Helsinki and, six years later, after rebranding his company, it is now worth more than one billion dollars. Verda, the company previously known as DataCrunch, raised $ 189 million in an oversubscribed Series B funding round that also attracted additional investment, bringing its valuation to over $1 billion. Emergence Capital, which has previously invested in Salesforce and Zoom, led the round, with other investors being Supermicro, MUFG Innovation Partners, Varma, a Nordic pension fund, Lifeline Ventures, 6 Degrees Capital, byFounders, and Tesi. From renting GPUs in a garage to reaching unicorn status. Bryon, an engineer from Belgium, founded the company to offer additional GPU capacity to machine learning researchers who were frustrated by the high costs and complexity of large cloud providers. The company achieved cash-flow positivity within just a few weeks and currently has Nokia, 1X, ExpressVPN and Freepik among its clients. In November 2025, the company renamed itself Verda and raised $64 million in its Series A funding round. It also became one of the few NVIDIA Preferred Partners and, as a result, gained priority access to the limited supply of GPUs. Verda manages all aspects of its operations, including the data centres in Finland and Iceland, which are powered by renewable energy, and the software employed for model training and deployment. Since it handles every part of its business and uses cheap energy from the Nordic countries, Verda can offer prices up to 90% lower than those of the major cloud providers. "AI is becoming critical infrastructure across industries, and the next few years are a pivotal window for Europe. Our north star is to build the first true tech company in Europe, with AI infrastructure as the starting foundation, and to bring down the carbon footprint of compute worldwide. We're proud of our progress but are a long way from being done," said Bryon, Verda's founder and CEO. Competing with tech giants on a limited budget. When compared with its rivals, Verda's total funding of $450 million is quite modest. The UK-based company Nscale raised more than $3.6 billion and had a post-March Series C valuation of $14.6 billion. CoreWeave, which is listed on the Nasdaq, had a revenue backlog of $99.4 billion in March. Lambda, located in San Jose, reached a $5.9 billion valuation after its November Series E and is now preparing for an IPO. What sets Verda apart is its financial discipline, since profitability is a rare thing in the industry and firms in it usually spend a lot of money. By July, Verda's annualised revenue run rate had reached $165 million, up from $100 million. The company opened offices in London and San Francisco at the beginning of 2026 and now employs about 250 people from more than 40 countries, which is nearly double the number it had the previous year. "Demand for AI compute is insatiable, and the gap between demand and supply is growing. Verda is moving quickly to secure and scale capacity, with the technology, ambition, and momentum to become a defining AI infrastructure company," said Joe Floyd, general partner at Emergence Capital. In 2026, the global AI cloud infrastructure market is currently valued at about $58.5 billion and is expected to reach $297 billion by 2034, representing an annual growth rate of 22.5%. It is not yet clear whether Verda's profitability reflects a genuine competitive advantage or is merely due to the company having raised less money than its rivals. Since it faces competitors with considerably more funding, strong unit economics may prove more important than size.