Every time I see an idea like this (or a politician talking about tech 'sovereignty') I feel sad for the 20-year-old me who really believed in the declaration of the independence of cyberspace.
> Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
Cyberspace promised us we can all work together to create things, like one species coming together to solve problems. Now in 2026, we need to “space” for every little tribe…
Exactly. There never was a declaration of independence of cyberspace. BUT government and law moved too slowly by years and years. And they have, of course, not learned their lesson.
For example: suing Nappster 2 years after it launched. And that was just because it was an extremely clear-cut case. By the time they did that there were 10 such networks, none of which were sued, none of which had clear laws or court decisions stating clearly one way or the other if it was legal.
And when we're talking a vague issue, for example how copyright affects search engines, the first actually settled case (which was still a far cry from establishing the rules) happened in 2006, 16 years after the initial search engine started operating and over 8 years after Google started it's meteoric rise. The specific decision the courts deigned to make, after 16 years? That caching a page so it can be used to build a search index in the first place does not by itself violate copyright. Great, well, that covers it then. My point is, by then the cat was out of the bag, ran to the neighbors house, got 6 kittens, who each got 6 kittens themselves and one of it's grandchildren ate the sandwich the judge was hoping to have for lunch and one of the other kittens got adopted by the president of the US, while the rest invaded and destroyed the houses of publishers that tried to protect their copyright.
Imagine the insanity, the damage that any real court decision against search engines would do today. "No you can't show previews". "Ads don't respect trademarks". There is no room for any such decisions now. The few decisions they have made (in >30 years) have amplified the damage to the victims that the court system tried to help (just ask a few newspapers).
Of course, none of this has instilled any sense of reasonableness, modesty or urgency in any parliament, court or even executive around the globe. For instance, they could PRE-clarify the laws before AI takes over 5 industries. Does AI training violate copyright? What are the rights of an employee that gets fired because AI does their job? No government felt the need to answer the copyright question when it mattered, 7 years ago, and there is ZERO action on the second question. Are they planning to answer the people displacement question once 99% of companies have done it because competition forced them to?
Now any answer they give on the copyright front is beside the point since no court or Parliament actually has the power to order existing (potentially law-violating) models to be destroyed. Once again, they have placed themselves into a position where they are totally irrelevant. Now one might ask, the time is to decide if you violate copyright by training a model using a model that was trained while violating copyright. Perhaps that one is still relevant. But nothing will be done.
And please, it doesn't matter what your position is on the issue. Can model training violate copyright? Yes or no? We live in a democracy and no decision is made. This is an important part of why big companies get to openly violate laws on an unprecedented scale for billions and billions without consequences while kids sometimes get locked up for stealing a single candy.
Worse, physical reality now also depends on "cyberspace".
This stuff only worked, socially and politically, when it was a niche. Echoing the comment of Nursie, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47071177 ; as soon as "everyone" is online, online is also real life. People thought it might be a haven for progressive politics, but that didn't outlast the Howard Dean campaign and it turned out that the right-wing could do online politics as well. The medium doesn't care whether your message is pro- or anti-genocide.
The ability of hyper-online memelords to inject bad ideas into the online right policy space has been an absolute disaster for all concerned. US policy is now downstream of Twitter. Let that sink in, as it were.
In a very cyberpunk dystopia way, online warfare is now co-evolved with both kinetic warfare (Ukraine's meme army trying to secure them external support) and urban warfare (following ICE agents around to post video of what they're doing on the Internet is as effective a tactic as legal action).
People forget that the "cyber" of "cyberpunk" and "cyberspace" comes from "cybernetics", meaning systems of control. In the beginning amateurs had control because it wasn't important. Now it turns out that, yes, the question of which country owns the chat client all the government staff are using is a question of national security.
As someone who remembers my local ISP come home to install a router and fiddle with cables when I was a child, saw governments block and censor specific parts of it, and had a weeklong ordeal getting PPPoE on my own router to work with my ISP just recently, this seems immediately intuitive and understandable. Frankly I'm surprised it wasn't for some people, at any point.
Indeed. I first encountered the "declaration of independence of cyberspace" a few years after it was written, and at the time I was immediately reminded of the Full Metal Jacket quote that goes something like "you can give your heart to Jesus but your ass belongs to the Marine Corps!"
That is to say the Declaration is pure cringe. The idea that cyberspace could become sovereign unto itself is patently absurd: The user's ass belongs to whichever country they inhabit.
> I feel sad for the 20-year-old me who really believed in the declaration of the independence of cyberspace.
I would say it was… until everybody is connected to the internet all the time. I would love to get back to the internet from… around 2010? Something like that. IRC was still a thing (made a lot of friends there, many of them I know in person now), forums was still live, blogs were still worth to read and write (nowadays I see like most of ppl moved to fb/ln/x to post…).
When it got "crowded" it's stopped being government independent. Back in a day everyone was (pseudo)anonymous, and here - we're thinking about age restrictions, socials requesting ID/face scans… I do not like the ways it's moving.
Its most horrifying if you look at what it usually burns down and fizzles out to. Governments in the middle east- one dominant family, extracting, the rest suffering in silence boxed away in silos, with no chance to move and create ever again - well except for unrest and fundamentalist movements.
This reads as very naive now. As soon as a critical mass of people got online, and they wanted their governments to apply laws and regulations there, it was going to happen.
This declaration was written from the days when those who were interacting online were making a real effort to do so, who really wanted to be there, who were in a niche, who were observing 'netiquette' and other quaint notions. They were generally educated, generally technologists by profession or interest, and in those circumstances it's easy to see the utopia you have created and declare it good, with no need for regulation.
It's a little like when you have a small team of skilled, motivated engineers - work gets done to a high standard without the need for onerous processes. But when you start recruiting and growing the team wider, and bring in lots of juniors...
> We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.
That didn't turn out so well IMHO. People got on there and then ... yuck, they did people stuff. Harassed each other, commited fraud, blackmail and extortion, created and exchanged CSAM. Cyberspace has suffered from government and commercial overreach, certainly, and so much regulation has been commercial in nature rather than actually about safety.
But the dream of an internet free from any form of government regulation? Never could have lasted when everyone got on here.
And just look at our civilisation of the mind, in its centralised fortresses with its own aristocracy exerting control over what information gets fed to the masses.
And even on a technical level, in 1996 people still used to leave mail relays open to be neighbourly!
Such an idea never made any real sense, and never will until you can figure out how to move IT infrastructure into a separate dimension where governments have no authority. Those servers have to sit somewhere.
All this, and no mention of Sealand [0]? An unrecognized micronation in (formerly) international waters, with a hosting company (back then) that allowed almost everything, and its own coup and counter attack by the "legitimate" royals (and then Germany having to negotiate POW release of the coup organizer).
Aside from the counterpoints made by the other responders, this still won't work: you need a physical connection to those servers, and you can't just WiFi to servers thousands of kilometers away. So the servers need to be in another dimension, so you can access them without government interference.
That's the whole plan with the space servers.
As soon as we sort out a few problems, we're good to go.
Problems:
Solar flare & radiation resistance.
Heat dissipation.
Energy (more effective solar panels, for things as close to sun as we).
Partially solved - getting to orbit. And as much as we hate musk, SpaceX might solve it once Starships start flying commercially.
If we would separate energy part out and beam it somehow, we could sit in a body's shadow in some Lagrange point equivalent for a given body system and greatly reduce heat dissipation requirements and suspectibility to solar flares.
Wait a one minute, who owns those space Servers? The same guy who runs starlink? The one who uses that power to threaten to cut access to those who refuse to do his bidding?
Come on, pull the other one, surely it can’t be that something so useful can be used as a tool for Mafia style politics.
As someone extremely sceptical of musk, I do have some hope that competition between spacex and it's Chinese competitors will make space somewhat accessible to hobbyists.
I don’t understand why Mistral gets so little recognition. They consistently have a top model on benchmarks such as LiveBench and their models are open source. Hugging Face is French, Black Forrest Labs (Stable Diffusion) is German, Weaviate is Dutch, Hetzner for IaasS. There’s AI here. Maybe hardware production is the bigger problem?
There are European or open-source alternatives for just about everything. Beginning with the OS, there's Linux and going all the up in the stack, we've got stuff like Nextcloud, OnlyOffice, LibreOffice, and so on.
Some hardware is produced in Europe. Goodram is a nice example. What we do not have is a processor architecture, nor factories. The closest to European is ARM. It is a British company, which is good, but outside the EU, and controlled by a Japanese holding, and fabless. Being fabless is the main issue here. (Edit: The Raspberry Pi is a strategic showcase of the status. It is a non-EU European product, uses a non-EU European ISA, ARM, but the chip implementing that ISA is made by a US company, Broadcom, and the Pi is the closest that we can get in terms of strategic autonomy).
I believe that our over-reliance on x64 is by far our biggest risk. ARM's existence should give us some comfort, but I don't think that it is enough, though. If I were to define a EU strategy for digital sovereignty, one of my cornerstones would be to bet on an ISA architecture and have a strategy to bring to Europe at least one CPU factory. I don't think that starting from scratch would be a viable option. However, betting on an existing open source architecture like RISC-V to make it far more mainstream could be viable. No matter how much we'd invest on RISC-V and how successful it would become, the point wouldn't be to make other blocs dependent on us, but to sever our current dependence on them.
Mistral Vibe is cheap for what you get - I haven't run into limits yet, and you can use the same API key for the CLI for their API to run Codestral, Mistral large, etc. Le Chat is great as well, especially research mode. Afaik their models are running on Cerebras so you are never waiting for a response.
Obviously Opus and Codex are better for coding, but I dont really use it much to generate actual code so I don't think I'm missing much.
Do they? That's surprising. I saw them come up here twice for their OCR model, I tried using it on a 200 PDF that was just printed text without embedded OCR and it failed miserably - got less than tesseract and I ended up with a $5 bill.
I figured Mistral was a nice idea and liked because it was a European competitor more than because it competes. I'll be happy to be wrong if it has improved
I tried the API on a coding task and it did worse than I would've hoped. Also $5. They still have a ways to go, I think.
I also use their chat pretty frequently, it seems to "misunderstand" me more often than other models. But that's free and it isn't as irritating to rephrase a question as it is backing out code changes.
I like that they have local models available, I plan to try those sometime.
That's another problem with the idea of tech sovereignity. Anything succesful, even if it started in Europe, will go global, including literally going to the USA
If the political regime in the US continues, that will come to an end. You can see it happening already - London has been a big beneficiary of Trump’s agenda.
Used to be much more distributed before WWII, or even before the dotcom boom. SV looks like an unstoppable vortex for everything high tech, to the point it becomes a security risk for everyone else
Basically every company has American investors. But for Mistral, ASML is the biggest, I think, and the french founders also still hold significant amounts.
And Black Forest labs is still headquartered in Freiburg, Germany. They just have a lab in SF.
That's why the European way to tech sovereignty is (publicly-funded) free software. Cannot be bought by unlimited VC money from The Valley, and it benefits the rest of the world, which is a tiny drop, and hence a necessary one, in Europe offsetting the damages of colonization, past and present.
Can you explain how you mean this? Obviously, it helps if the knowledge of the codebase is with a trusted partner. But taking as an example Grist (https://getgrist.org), which is developed by a NY-based US company and is part of the French La suite numérique (LSN). Should a geopolitical reason get in the way of Grist devs further collaborating with LSN, don't you think that France's sovereignty is safeguarded by the availability of the code?
Granted, it'd be a setback. But nothing a couple of dedicated French devs could not tackle.
I think this post is useful if you are, say, a European that wants to find a nearby tech company to work for or are curious where the tech "scene" is at in Europe
Based on the creator of EU Tech Map having an AI-powered advertising company and the mistakes in the entries, I assume the site was populated using LLMs. For example, LibreOffice is incorrectly listed as being closed source, SaaS and paid: https://eutechmap.com/company/libreoffice
There are no european alternatives. These are all european companies but they dont benefit the whole union.
If a germany company gets big it will eat other european markets leaving nothing in those markets and then beg Merz for more immigrants to Germany instead of hiring other europeans.
Stop being racist. Immigrants are given the lowest level type of jobs which nobody wants to do anymore. Others are then prospering to better jobs. That's how you keep the economy growing.
Buying exactly what? Bus and taxi drivers, people working in the supermarkets, in the low cost stores, food chains, delivery services, call agent support, then the workers in the industry plants etc etc
Are you suggesting that locals are doing that type of work?
But I can move freely to Germany and get employed there as an EU citizen. Or, my competitors in the job market do, leaving more jobs for men And taxes pain in Germany also goes to the common EU budget. So the success of a German company also benefits me in another EU country.
Isn’t the relationship exactly the same as a company in my country, but another town? I could also gripe that jobs in that other town will not pay my municipality’s taxes.
The title is wrong as they only included EU/EEA/EFTA/UK companies, at least according to their faq page. Which would exclude multiple balkan countries and some others.
They need to fix the addresses. In Stockholm, all of the companies are placed in the old town. At Hopsworks, we are in Sodermalm (hipster) - we are not old school money.
The European digital scene isn't a pipeline problem; it's an institutional 'safe harbor' problem. We have world-class publicly funded research and education, and the talent, just look at the startup floor at Vivatech or WebSummit, but European Private Equity and late-stage capital remain structurally locked into 'Old Economy' models.
In Europe, valuation is still largely tied to tangible assets and steady EBITDA. This creates a massive 'Patient Capital' gap. While US investors have evolved to price the long-term unit economics of digital scaling, where high initial burn is the cost of building a global moat, European private equity remains culturally risk-averse. They prefer the predictable, incremental returns of a specialized factory over the 'winner-takes-most' volatility of digital platforms. By prioritizing collateral over code, our domestic capital is effectively subsidizing the past rather than financing the future. That's our problem.
Well said. Another factor that nobody in the EU likes to talk about is regulations like worker protections that make it hard to do layoffs. Such regulations are popular but they strongly favor large predictable companies over startups.
No economy has both: (1) a predictable investment and work environment, and (2) a vibrant technology sector. You make your choices and you live with them.
Is Spotify US based? They did get listed on the NY Exchange but I think they are still headquartered in Sweden. Not that one example says much but if true, at least one tech giant managed to not succumb to American capital.
not all that useful. for a more useful alternative I'd prefer to see companies up from a certain size (I've noticed some small startups on the map) and if the're (not) using aws/azure/gcp/chinaCloud (whatever the names are).
I briefly went thought the list - a lot of hosted systems (probably kubernetes underneath etc). This is not unique or anything.
The list is quite sus ;) did you know that cockroachdb is a German company? :) it’s in the list. And this is like 3rd company in the category that I was checking
Europe still loves their old money, (hidden) class system and deeply entrenched bureaucracy way too much to allow some plebs to get rich that quickly.
European way of doing things to me feels like fundamentally incompatible with high pace way of doing things in software area.
Personally, I don’t believe that anything significant can come up from places other than US or China. About 10 years ago Russians were doing a lot of “own” stuff (clickhouse comes to mind first), but I suspect that isolation and brain drain will eventually capture them.
I mentioned software, but didn’t said that I specifically focus on it.
Asml, arm, novo - neither of them are software companies. From what I’ve seen asml wouldn’t work without zeiss, another European company.
This still doesn’t invalidate my premise that software landscape is completely and totally dominated by us/Chinese companies, except probably gaming, where couple of hits can make a studio from any country a world class player, like CD Project Red
The fact is that Europe is a lot of things. You have the British class system (not that hidden), you have French and German bureaucracy, but you also have the unique combination of egalitarianism and mercantilism in Scandinavia and the Netherlands, and the zeal of Polish progressivism, shared by a number of their former east block neighbors.
There are places in Europe where you can easily achieve a higher standard of living (on average) than the US, and there are places where you can't.
I believe the reason that Europe is behind on commercial software is just economic: Solid, standardized solutions were available coming from US companies, and they were seen as low-risk for decades, so why would any company try to compete? Network effects apply to things like office suites and e-mail clients just as much as social media. Microsoft doesn't have any serious US or Chinese competitors in this space either.
That's not to say there aren't problems: The pipeline from startup to big tech firm is extremely difficult in Europe, largely because capital is much more conservative, stemming from the fact that European capital tends to be concentrated in things like pension funds. For years, successful European tech startups have at some point or another hooked into the US Bay Area ecosystem (capital, talent pool, etc.), because the local environment was way too risk-averse.
But I think you, like many, have succumbed to anti-European propaganda, which comes in a couple of forms: pro-corporatist, pro-Putinist, orientalist/sinophile, etc.
The capital situation is especially dumb. There's been a lot of debate recently in Denmark about why our pension funds invest a lot of money in US venture capital funds that then invest in Danish startups that have moved to the Bay Area. The same money could have been invested in the same startups here in Europe.
we live in an age where manufacturing of any kind, software, ai rule the world, and EUs output there is shrinking.
I think that in current day and age EU feels entitled to disproportionately higher standards of living to its output.
And given that, EUs awakening will be the rudest. US’s is going to be too, but different
I don’t want to share some personal grievances, but my negative perspective on EU (esp Germany) is from personal experience. I don’t think that I succumbed to propaganda and I’m certainly not a fan of P or X
EU tech alternative is FLOSS, not copy the model someone else did earlier and better. As an EU Citizen I reject the initiatives of the Commission, which moreover, is not elected but appointed through a mechanism where the will of the people never plays a part, whose goals are the sinicization of the EU and its destruction for partisan interests against ours.
To have a sovereign IT sector, we must ENFORCE FLOSS and open hardware in no uncertain terms, rather than copying Big Tech.
ASML Holding is dominating the chip technology with their machines. It's not the lack of invention or intellectual capability that holds Europe back from the digital industry, it's the lack of willing long term European invenstors. If you want to scale your digital tech startup in Europe the most viable way is to look to the US for investors.
I think that it would require there to be a European chip demand. Today that demand is almost entirely for cars, so we only get mediocre car infotainment chips (+ a few other similar niches). There was more hope 20 years ago, when there were widely successful European mobile phone makers.
First of all, thank you Puppion for posting here! Was happy to see EU Tech Map being talked about on one the most interesting corners of the web.
A few things upfront:
1) What the site is (and isn’t)
The goal is to make it easier to discover European tech companies (EU/EEA/EFTA/UK for now) and, where relevant, find alternatives to commonly used tools. It’s not attempting to claim “we have a European Google/Amazon/Nvidia” today. It’s a directory that helps people answer: “If I want a European vendor in category X, who exists and where are they based?”
2) Accuracy concerns are fair
A couple of you pointed out incorrect entries (LibreOffice classification, CockroachDB origin, etc.). Those are real issues and I’m fixing them. The site is only as useful as the trust people can place in the data.
What I’m doing in the near-term:
- Adding source/provenance per field (HQ, license model, pricing model, category, etc.) so it’s obvious what’s confirmed vs inferred.
- Tightening the validation rules (e.g. OSS status should never be wrong for well-known projects).
- Making it easier to submit corrections and see what changed.
- If you spot bad entries, the most helpful thing you can do is drop the company page + what’s wrong + a source (official docs/site/Wikipedia is fine). I’ll prioritize the ones mentioned here first.
3) The map clustering / addresses
Yep — geocoding is currently too naive in some cases (a few cities end up pinned centrally). That’s being addressed by improving address parsing and allowing companies to set a more accurate location when they claim their page.
4) Performance
The slow load and delayed map pins are on me. I’m already working on:
- better caching
- loading pins progressively
- reducing initial payload
- a simpler “list-first” mode for people who don’t care about the map
5) “Why not use existing sites?”
There are great lists out there. Some focus on product alternatives, some on buy-European movements, some on OSS. This one is trying to combine “ecosystem discovery” (who exists, where, what they do) with “alternatives” browsing. If it ends up redundant, it’ll deserve to lose.
6) Sovereignty / nationalism
I’m not trying to sell nationalism or “Europe first because vibes.” People have different reasons for caring: procurement rules, data residency, risk management, legal exposure, preference for local support, or simply curiosity about the EU tech scene. The directory is just an information layer. Use it if it helps, ignore it if it doesn’t.
Finally, appreciate both the feedback and to some degree criticism — if this becomes genuinely useful, it’ll be because people here kept the quality bar high.
I built this as a hobby project myself and launched it "for fun" just 3 days ago, and it has really exploded online, more than I would ever anticipate. So, please bear with me as I'm working day and night to improve the site.
Peak EU mindset thinking all we need is a nifty little map application to find alternatives.
Meanwhile, tech companies are continuing to bail into the US the moment they reach significant revenue due to crushing tax and labour costs (see e.g. Oura announcing their departure from Finland yesterday)
Unfortunately the EU and many local governments have chosen to double down on crippling socialism (presumedly to "own Trump") so this continue at an accelerating pace.
Where in the EU is a software engineer paid SV FAANG rates?
> Oura announcing their departure from Finland yesterday
The article I read said they were moving their HQ domicile to Delaware in preparation for a US stock market listing. A bit like US companies do. It said firmly that roughly half of its staff were already in the US, half in Finland, and that wasn't going to change.
I made two assertions and I believe both are true. You seem to be stretching what I said to some form of "and ASML has done nothing else on top", which I didn't say. Maybe I should reduce "their core tech" to EUV, but that's clearly what I meant if you look up the history of the company.
No, I just didn't find any evidence that ASML licences "their core tech" from US. Let it be EUV but I still can't find any sources on it. Do you have some?
Good. You can keep most of those, we don't want them.
Imagine a food version: "I don't see a McDonalds equivalent!". Good, you can keep that obesity-supporting fast-food crap, we (those without the addiction) don't want it.
“Tech alternatives” yet a good portion of the companies I randomly clicked on are software services/outsourcing, especially on the eastern side.
Show me a European iPhone, European Microsoft, European Nvidia, etc. Hell, I’ll take a European one man company that can reach all 27 markets.
Europe needs a single market for capital and the removal of legal barriers to extend across the continent, foremost for the little guy. Von der Failen can only add _more_ regulation. Someone wake me when they actually make something easier.
Feels like you're addressing two different topics in one comment.
Legally speaking, a one person company can address the whole EEA market. From a marketing/sales standpoint yeah, sure, it's probably hard to address culturally different markets like Portugal, Poland and Sweden.
But it does not have much to do with regulations, especially not ones decided at the EU level.
I'm all for better integration but diverse cultures are here to stay....
Sample size of one, but done business in Italy, Spain, Belgium, France, Switzerland and Germany: main issues were not regulation related...
That is false. You can absolutely found a company by just getting an entry as a merchant here with neither of the things you listed. If you want to found a limited liability company though, then yes, you need some monetary backing to cover for fuckups (likely the 25k are not fully covering it anyway) and a notary to make it official.
No, you CANNOT found a company like that. It’s an absolute fabrication.
You also seem to somehow justify spending 25k on an endeavor you don’t know will succeed upfront, when every other country on the planet allows you to open one with orders of magnitude smaller amounts of capital.
You can open a UK LTD in a few days with 12GBP. Similar in DK/NL/CZ… the list goes on.
I’ve learned firsthand that germans will bend over backwards to justify this insanity.
Needing to put in >1000 EUR in starting capital is not uncommon. The "cheapest Danish limited liability company, the Aps needs 20k DKK up front, i.e. ~3000 EUR. In Sweden an AB needs 25k SEK, ~2300 EUR.
And you can always dissolve the company and take the capital out again tax free, so what's the big deal?
> No, you CANNOT found a company like that. It’s an absolute fabrication.
I'm a German. I have done this myself. I assure you it's true.
> You also seem to somehow justify spending 25k on an endeavor you don’t know will succeed upfront, when every other country on the planet allows you to open one with orders of magnitude smaller amounts of capital.
If you are planning a serious endeavour where you intend to limit your liability, you'll have a business plan. And that allows multiple options, from a bank loan of a local bank that will very likely be granted on good conditions, to one of the various municipal, regional, or federal programs that offer grants for newly founded companies. My current company secured 200k Euro at the beginning from a federal program that we did not have to pay back, for example.
You are clearly misinformed. According to German law, you can start a UG (limited) with only 1€ + notary cost. Starting a business with personal liability doesn't cost anything.
It's beyond me why anyone would downvote that. An UG is uninvestable, and a GmbH would also scare most investors. Anything but an AG is not going to work.
What are you talking about..? A GmbH is the German equivalent of an Ltd. An AG is a publicly traded company and thus not something investors are looking for. Also, the majority of companies in Germany are just ordinary eigetragene Kaufmänner (so normal businesspeople like your average plumber), or GmbH (literally any other company that isn’t a stock market traded enterprise).
> Europe needs a single market for capital and the removal of legal barriers to extend across the continent, foremost for the little guy.
?!?
You can trivially sell your software inside the EU. As for software that I use almost daily: OsmAnd. LanguageTool, which is spell-checking this message, is made in Germany. IntelliJ products are made in Czechia, and I'm using them right now.
You can sell products anywhere but you’re battling 27 different sets of rules and legislations. Look at how a burger shop becomes a continent wide franchise overnight and you’ll see how that’s impossible in the EU.
We just lack the regulatory freedom and deep financial markets, access to credit, etc.
A burger shop is a hard example. Software is trivial. Distribution of goods is no harder than the US and its sales tax regime, that is different in all 50 states and can be different in each county inside that state. In EU you can use the One Stop Shop.
In the US you're battling 51 different rules and legislations, plus the countless county and city legislations if you're shipping or doing anything physical. The EU is better.
I don't know why this is held up as some insurmountable challenge: every US state has different laws, if you sell any software to solve business problems you'll be dealing with 50 different legal codes and regulations you have to support too.
>Show me a European iPhone, European Microsoft, European Nvidia, etc.
The "avoid dependence on the US" movement only really started picking up steam with Trump's accelerating dementia in his second term.
The iPhone, Microsoft, and nVidia all took multiple decades to develop into the behemoths they are today. Famously, the first iPhone was actually expensive trash: no apps, no 3G, couldn't even cut and paste text. It wasn't until the 3G model and the App Store that it became a true success.
> Famously, the first iPhone was actually expensive trash: no apps, no 3G, couldn't even cut and paste text.
Also famously, while the tech elitists complained about all of its shortcomings, the broader consumer market fully embraced it and it single-handedly drove an entirely new generation of consumer electronics.
For the record, it let you read the same web pages as a desktop computer over WiFi. It had a usable mapping app and good music app.
The rest of the experience, stuff like alarms, calculator, address book, etc. also worked nicely.
Those turned out to be things no one else was offering. I had a Nokia N95 at the time and the original iPhone was a big improvement on everything except the camera.
Yes, as I wrote initially: the iPhone is a behemoth today, but its first version was underwhelming to say the least.
My point, which you seem to have overlooked, is that parent poster complaining that a "european iphone" doesn't exist is not realistic, considering how it went for Apple.
The consumer market embraced it despite its shortcomings because it looked nice and was easy to use; the alternatives were not. Yeah, it didn't do that much, but it did more than a flip phone. The alternatives wanted you to use a stylus just to use your phone, and tried to basically recreate the MS Windows UI on a tiny screen; their UI was terrible.
Realistically, what you're asking for won't happen unless there's a strong push for Federalisation.
Unfortunately, most Eastern Bloc countries are led into the false belief that the EU is encroaching on their ways of life and "making them eat ze bugs", and the Brussels elite is more concerned with using their slim remaining political capital to push restrictions on internet freedoms rather than federalisation.
Over the last 20 years, Europe has become irrelevant.
There is not a single European LLM on the same level as US or Chinese models. France's Mistral reached 400M in revenue, but I believe it could have been more relevant if the EU had not slowed everything down with overregulation.
Why does Europe need to dump hundreds of billions of dollars into developing a chatbot that will never be able to pay off its debts? Mistral seems like a much more practical and sustainable approach to LLM development than centering the entire economy around a pyramid scheme predicated on selling the belief that AGI is always three months away.
China's LLM development relative to resources spent is impressive, but it also happened to be predicated on Chinese miners buying into the previous pyramid scheme and having a lot of GPUs on hand already. I don't think the lack of European commitment to the previous pyramid scheme putting it a bit behind in that regard indicates any kind of grand regional failure, so much as an event of pure circumstance that probably has little lasting meaning 5 or 10 years from now.
Conversely, every person calling LLMs "agents" never had any credibility to begin with. Despite my many attempts to coerce an example out of people here, I am still waiting for one (1) singular demonstration of "agentic software" that is capable of replacing production-grade software at scale. Software created by agents that solves a real-world problem and is used by tens of thousands or millions of people. Candidates include an OS, a web browser, an IDE, image editing software akin to Photoshop, a fully-featured Discord/Slack/etc. replacement, a non-trivial video game, music production software, enterprise-grade database software etc., really anything that isn't just another AI tool to produce another AI tool to produce another AI tool culminating in complete psychosis and detachment from anything people do in the real world. If you would like to be the first to provide evidence that these things are more capable than chatbots in concrete terms, by all means, go ahead.
We have been overly reliant on non-European partners we could trust and rely on. That is now gone. So right now is a good opportunity for Europe to focus inward. Imagine having all the social benefits AND tech. We also need to make sure keep malignant actors like the USA & Russia at bay.
One can dream.
Yes, I agree. But it was Europe that has become complacent and lazy. "Doing good" is more important than "doing right". As a result, with energy prices high, dependence on Russia only increased, and car manufacturers (Stellantis, Mercedes -50% revenue) are dying as have shipbuilders before them.
Dependence on Russia is quite sharply down. In Q1 2022 the EU imported 63 billion EUR worth of goods from Russia, in Q3 2025 only 5.7 billion. So down 90%.
In terms of fossil fuels:
- Russia isn't even in the top 6 oil supplies of the EU. The top 6 are USA, Norway, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, Libya and Iraq. They make up ~60% of EU oil imports.
- In raw natural gas: Norway, Algeria, UK and Azerbaijan supply 81% of EU imports.
- In liquefied natural gas: USA, Qatar and Algeria supply 68% of EU imports.
Add to that Dutch and Danish North Sea oil and gas and it's evident the EU is not "dependent" on Russia.
I am old enough to remember variations of this conversation from 20 years ago. If you scratch, you always find ideology underneath: an antipathy for regulation that puts people before money and for sharing the cost of social safety nets. I like living in Europe. It's not perfect (what is), but it's pretty good. Living my life well vs. worrying about my country not buying enough GPUs to keep the markets excited? Choices, choices...
IMHO the EU is the best place to live if you're a rank-and-file worker, and the US is the best place to live if you're ambitious.
EU integration brings some advantages but it also becomes harder to experiment. Ideally you'd have a few member states vying to become the Shenzhen of Europe but that won't happen under EU integration.
That assumes LLMs are relevant and will be around a year from now. Let’s not forget NFTs.
Your comment is also blind to the absurd amount of research and projects which are born here but later move to look for funding.
So the EU is not irrelevant, on the contrary, we’re just mourning the fall of the US and transitioning to an independent future. Who would’ve though, we’d end up needing to build a copy of everything…
I used it as another “there was a strong tech push but ultimately we couldn’t make it work” kind of idea. With NFTs the grift was immediately visible, with LLMs it’s a bit harder, the whole “AI” facade gives people hope - I want to believe and stuff.
Rubio is a mouthpiece for a regime that’s not qualified to discuss Europe, or even his very own US of A. All he meant in his speech is that his government has chosen isolation
Using a European solution just because it’s European sounds wrong to me.
Sounds like we’ve done this kind of nationalism in the past and failed. There are other reasons why Europe isn’t attractive for bringing these kinds of technologies to life, and investor money is only a small part of it. Especially in a company’s early days.
Building a market reserved for mediocre tech solutions sounds like the wrong way to make Europe more independent.
Maybe Europe shouldn’t copy the nationalism, but governments should copy some of the reasons the breeding grounds in the US and China exist. Think about how they got that far, and especially how China caught up so fast.
1. I'm not sure China caught up so quickly due to any lack of nationalism.
2. There's an allure to working with an EU business because it's in the EU because they're less likely to jerk you around. You have no idea how many times I get told their in nothing they can do, then have to drop the 'I live in the EU and this is illegal' card, and magically the problem is resolved by the next email.
> Using a European solution just because it’s European sounds wrong to me.
That depends who you are, and what you are doing. If you have information stored such that having it in US infrastructure is a national security risk, then you might think differently.
>but governments should copy some of the reasons the breeding grounds in the US and China exist.
Which reasons should they copy? Massive government subsidies? Large grants masquerading as defence contracts? Threatening foreign governments to force market access with taxation lower than the native businesses? Are you saying European governments should favour European companies just because they are European?
> Which reasons should they copy? Massive government subsidies? Large grants masquerading as defence contracts? Threatening foreign governments to force market access with taxation lower than the native businesses? Are you saying European governments should favour European companies just because they are European?
The US and China pulling all this shit is exactly why the whole European alternatives thing is trending. Before Trump started threatening everyone, we had no problem using US tech.
I think that it's more a case of "Before Trump started threatening everyone, there were problems with using US tech but we chose to ignore them because it was too hard to do anything about it"
To my reading the US, despite the 'safe harbour' assurances, has never been somewhere that European people's data should have been sent, because we know that the US requires its companies to give access to that data on demand, usually secretly. So any assurances that data is entirely confidential are meaningless.
It's one of the reasons I was so incensed with gov.uk using google analytics and Zendesk (even though Zendesk has its origins in Denmark, it's now based in SF). Their pleadings that 'data is anonymised by google' were not reassuring at all, and it constitutes a complete record of UK citizen interactions with their own government, handed over to a US company on a silver platter.
At least now people are thinking about this stuff a bit more.
I think the depths of the answers here, particularly with China, are far beyond the scope of technical discussion and to be honest likely beyond the scope of European-specific tech needs. Just because the US did one thing a certain way, and China did it another way; doesn't mean Europe must follow either of those to be successful.
However, it is going to require public funds to achieve. A public/private partnership scenario is very likely at least the near to mid term future for European tech development. And the world can only stand to benefit.
Politically, nationalism is absolutely very bad and it's a shame the world is headed in this direction. This global distrust only serves chaos agents and accelerates us into another World War (if we aren't already in the early stages of one). I had hope that people would prefer to come together but it's unfortunately too risky with US politics.
Isn't that largely nationalism and pressuring companies to use (initially) mediocre local tech solutions though? Once the market is there, quality catches up rapidly.
> a year to fire people even when they don’t show up
In what country? I just checked, in France it's 15 days. The employer can ask to be paid the notice period, and the employee won't get unemployment benefits.
> As an employer/employee takes a year to fire people even when they don’t show up, ergo the incentive is to coast.
That is not true in the UK. In the first two years of service you can fire someone without a reason so long as you were not being deliberately discriminatory. Burden of proof on the employee for this
After that you just have to go through a fair process. Your decision is not in question, just whether you followed a fair process. I have worked in a place that routinely fired people for being 1 minute late on three occasions. Late once, verbal warning, late twice, written warning, late three times fired.
> As a founder you’re buried in bureaucracy and taxes, so the incentive is to stay an employee.
As a sole trader in the UK you can set up instantly. You have 3 months to let the tax authority know what you did, but no real threat if you leave it a bit longer. Setting up a corporate entity takes 10 minutes online. You can have that done by your accountant and the annual accounts done for maybe £300. No need for an audit until you have cross 2 out of three of these thresholds
Annual turnover of no more than £15 million
Gross assets of no more than £7.5 million
Average number of employees of no more than 50
Immediately you get a significant tax advantage over employees.
Easy access to capital is harder, unless you went to high-end private school that is. Development capital is not that hard to get, but seed funding is harder.
Every time I see an idea like this (or a politician talking about tech 'sovereignty') I feel sad for the 20-year-old me who really believed in the declaration of the independence of cyberspace.
> Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
edit: formatting
> I feel sad for the 20-year-old me who really believed in the declaration of the independence of cyberspace.
Cyberspace depends on physical reality and everything that comes from that. Resource constraints, economics, politics, arms races, warfare, etc.
Cyberspace promised us we can all work together to create things, like one species coming together to solve problems. Now in 2026, we need to “space” for every little tribe…
It was in no position to make such promises.
But it’s nice to think we can eventually end up as one big planet building things instead of 200+ tiny bickering states that need to redo all the work
Exactly. There never was a declaration of independence of cyberspace. BUT government and law moved too slowly by years and years. And they have, of course, not learned their lesson.
For example: suing Nappster 2 years after it launched. And that was just because it was an extremely clear-cut case. By the time they did that there were 10 such networks, none of which were sued, none of which had clear laws or court decisions stating clearly one way or the other if it was legal.
And when we're talking a vague issue, for example how copyright affects search engines, the first actually settled case (which was still a far cry from establishing the rules) happened in 2006, 16 years after the initial search engine started operating and over 8 years after Google started it's meteoric rise. The specific decision the courts deigned to make, after 16 years? That caching a page so it can be used to build a search index in the first place does not by itself violate copyright. Great, well, that covers it then. My point is, by then the cat was out of the bag, ran to the neighbors house, got 6 kittens, who each got 6 kittens themselves and one of it's grandchildren ate the sandwich the judge was hoping to have for lunch and one of the other kittens got adopted by the president of the US, while the rest invaded and destroyed the houses of publishers that tried to protect their copyright.
Imagine the insanity, the damage that any real court decision against search engines would do today. "No you can't show previews". "Ads don't respect trademarks". There is no room for any such decisions now. The few decisions they have made (in >30 years) have amplified the damage to the victims that the court system tried to help (just ask a few newspapers).
Of course, none of this has instilled any sense of reasonableness, modesty or urgency in any parliament, court or even executive around the globe. For instance, they could PRE-clarify the laws before AI takes over 5 industries. Does AI training violate copyright? What are the rights of an employee that gets fired because AI does their job? No government felt the need to answer the copyright question when it mattered, 7 years ago, and there is ZERO action on the second question. Are they planning to answer the people displacement question once 99% of companies have done it because competition forced them to?
Now any answer they give on the copyright front is beside the point since no court or Parliament actually has the power to order existing (potentially law-violating) models to be destroyed. Once again, they have placed themselves into a position where they are totally irrelevant. Now one might ask, the time is to decide if you violate copyright by training a model using a model that was trained while violating copyright. Perhaps that one is still relevant. But nothing will be done.
And please, it doesn't matter what your position is on the issue. Can model training violate copyright? Yes or no? We live in a democracy and no decision is made. This is an important part of why big companies get to openly violate laws on an unprecedented scale for billions and billions without consequences while kids sometimes get locked up for stealing a single candy.
it was true for about 3 years give or take
I maintain the peak of the internet was Numa Numa. After that its been a ever gaining speed decline of the internet.
Yes, all of our 20-year-old selves eventually learned that. No need to rub it in!
Worse, physical reality now also depends on "cyberspace".
This stuff only worked, socially and politically, when it was a niche. Echoing the comment of Nursie, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47071177 ; as soon as "everyone" is online, online is also real life. People thought it might be a haven for progressive politics, but that didn't outlast the Howard Dean campaign and it turned out that the right-wing could do online politics as well. The medium doesn't care whether your message is pro- or anti-genocide.
The ability of hyper-online memelords to inject bad ideas into the online right policy space has been an absolute disaster for all concerned. US policy is now downstream of Twitter. Let that sink in, as it were.
In a very cyberpunk dystopia way, online warfare is now co-evolved with both kinetic warfare (Ukraine's meme army trying to secure them external support) and urban warfare (following ICE agents around to post video of what they're doing on the Internet is as effective a tactic as legal action).
People forget that the "cyber" of "cyberpunk" and "cyberspace" comes from "cybernetics", meaning systems of control. In the beginning amateurs had control because it wasn't important. Now it turns out that, yes, the question of which country owns the chat client all the government staff are using is a question of national security.
As someone who remembers my local ISP come home to install a router and fiddle with cables when I was a child, saw governments block and censor specific parts of it, and had a weeklong ordeal getting PPPoE on my own router to work with my ISP just recently, this seems immediately intuitive and understandable. Frankly I'm surprised it wasn't for some people, at any point.
Missing on the list, but mostly part of it - human retardation. In politics, in private, everywhere.
The surplus binges of the 90s do not make for an accurate sample of human and politics nature.
Indeed. I first encountered the "declaration of independence of cyberspace" a few years after it was written, and at the time I was immediately reminded of the Full Metal Jacket quote that goes something like "you can give your heart to Jesus but your ass belongs to the Marine Corps!"
That is to say the Declaration is pure cringe. The idea that cyberspace could become sovereign unto itself is patently absurd: The user's ass belongs to whichever country they inhabit.
Maybe it can be aspirational.
> I feel sad for the 20-year-old me who really believed in the declaration of the independence of cyberspace.
I would say it was… until everybody is connected to the internet all the time. I would love to get back to the internet from… around 2010? Something like that. IRC was still a thing (made a lot of friends there, many of them I know in person now), forums was still live, blogs were still worth to read and write (nowadays I see like most of ppl moved to fb/ln/x to post…).
When it got "crowded" it's stopped being government independent. Back in a day everyone was (pseudo)anonymous, and here - we're thinking about age restrictions, socials requesting ID/face scans… I do not like the ways it's moving.
Its most horrifying if you look at what it usually burns down and fizzles out to. Governments in the middle east- one dominant family, extracting, the rest suffering in silence boxed away in silos, with no chance to move and create ever again - well except for unrest and fundamentalist movements.
we have been living in the US sovereignty until now, if you don't trust me ask, the people behind, The pirate bay, Dmitri Sklyarov or Kim dot com.
This reads as very naive now. As soon as a critical mass of people got online, and they wanted their governments to apply laws and regulations there, it was going to happen.
This declaration was written from the days when those who were interacting online were making a real effort to do so, who really wanted to be there, who were in a niche, who were observing 'netiquette' and other quaint notions. They were generally educated, generally technologists by profession or interest, and in those circumstances it's easy to see the utopia you have created and declare it good, with no need for regulation.
It's a little like when you have a small team of skilled, motivated engineers - work gets done to a high standard without the need for onerous processes. But when you start recruiting and growing the team wider, and bring in lots of juniors...
> We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.
That didn't turn out so well IMHO. People got on there and then ... yuck, they did people stuff. Harassed each other, commited fraud, blackmail and extortion, created and exchanged CSAM. Cyberspace has suffered from government and commercial overreach, certainly, and so much regulation has been commercial in nature rather than actually about safety.
But the dream of an internet free from any form of government regulation? Never could have lasted when everyone got on here.
And just look at our civilisation of the mind, in its centralised fortresses with its own aristocracy exerting control over what information gets fed to the masses.
And even on a technical level, in 1996 people still used to leave mail relays open to be neighbourly!
Such an idea never made any real sense, and never will until you can figure out how to move IT infrastructure into a separate dimension where governments have no authority. Those servers have to sit somewhere.
Doesn't have to be a different dimension, international waters or space would do.
All this, and no mention of Sealand [0]? An unrecognized micronation in (formerly) international waters, with a hosting company (back then) that allowed almost everything, and its own coup and counter attack by the "legitimate" royals (and then Germany having to negotiate POW release of the coup organizer).
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand
Both those places are heavily government controlled.
In fact international waters if you're not flagged and registered to a specific country, then it's open season for anyone to board and seize you.
Which is something the US has demonstrated so clearly recently.
This shows that if you want real freedom on the high seas, you need a submarine. Captain Nemo had the right idea.
Can tap directly into the undersea cables too!
I'm so mad that the bitcoin bro cruise ship never set sail. We missed out on some exciting drama.
Aside from the counterpoints made by the other responders, this still won't work: you need a physical connection to those servers, and you can't just WiFi to servers thousands of kilometers away. So the servers need to be in another dimension, so you can access them without government interference.
That's the whole plan with the space servers. As soon as we sort out a few problems, we're good to go.
Problems: Solar flare & radiation resistance. Heat dissipation. Energy (more effective solar panels, for things as close to sun as we).
Partially solved - getting to orbit. And as much as we hate musk, SpaceX might solve it once Starships start flying commercially.
If we would separate energy part out and beam it somehow, we could sit in a body's shadow in some Lagrange point equivalent for a given body system and greatly reduce heat dissipation requirements and suspectibility to solar flares.
Look at what he does now, you honestly think a person this greedy would ever exercise less than maximum control?
Wait a one minute, who owns those space Servers? The same guy who runs starlink? The one who uses that power to threaten to cut access to those who refuse to do his bidding?
Come on, pull the other one, surely it can’t be that something so useful can be used as a tool for Mafia style politics.
As someone extremely sceptical of musk, I do have some hope that competition between spacex and it's Chinese competitors will make space somewhat accessible to hobbyists.
Hobbyist is another name for consumer, so yes, consumer will have access as long as they pay.
Those that can’t pay or are politically undesirables, will be excluded from the global commons of space.
My take is that the great dream of unifying humanity through the internet won’t be helped by having it run in space.
I don’t understand why Mistral gets so little recognition. They consistently have a top model on benchmarks such as LiveBench and their models are open source. Hugging Face is French, Black Forrest Labs (Stable Diffusion) is German, Weaviate is Dutch, Hetzner for IaasS. There’s AI here. Maybe hardware production is the bigger problem?
Hardware: Spot on.
There are European or open-source alternatives for just about everything. Beginning with the OS, there's Linux and going all the up in the stack, we've got stuff like Nextcloud, OnlyOffice, LibreOffice, and so on.
Some hardware is produced in Europe. Goodram is a nice example. What we do not have is a processor architecture, nor factories. The closest to European is ARM. It is a British company, which is good, but outside the EU, and controlled by a Japanese holding, and fabless. Being fabless is the main issue here. (Edit: The Raspberry Pi is a strategic showcase of the status. It is a non-EU European product, uses a non-EU European ISA, ARM, but the chip implementing that ISA is made by a US company, Broadcom, and the Pi is the closest that we can get in terms of strategic autonomy).
I believe that our over-reliance on x64 is by far our biggest risk. ARM's existence should give us some comfort, but I don't think that it is enough, though. If I were to define a EU strategy for digital sovereignty, one of my cornerstones would be to bet on an ISA architecture and have a strategy to bring to Europe at least one CPU factory. I don't think that starting from scratch would be a viable option. However, betting on an existing open source architecture like RISC-V to make it far more mainstream could be viable. No matter how much we'd invest on RISC-V and how successful it would become, the point wouldn't be to make other blocs dependent on us, but to sever our current dependence on them.
There seems to be some progress with https://www.heise.de/en/news/Memory-chip-company-FMC-keeps-w... at least.
Maybe Goodram can then assemble their chips into consumer products? :-)
Mistral Vibe is cheap for what you get - I haven't run into limits yet, and you can use the same API key for the CLI for their API to run Codestral, Mistral large, etc. Le Chat is great as well, especially research mode. Afaik their models are running on Cerebras so you are never waiting for a response.
Obviously Opus and Codex are better for coding, but I dont really use it much to generate actual code so I don't think I'm missing much.
Do they? That's surprising. I saw them come up here twice for their OCR model, I tried using it on a 200 PDF that was just printed text without embedded OCR and it failed miserably - got less than tesseract and I ended up with a $5 bill.
I figured Mistral was a nice idea and liked because it was a European competitor more than because it competes. I'll be happy to be wrong if it has improved
I tried the API on a coding task and it did worse than I would've hoped. Also $5. They still have a ways to go, I think.
I also use their chat pretty frequently, it seems to "misunderstand" me more often than other models. But that's free and it isn't as irritating to rephrase a question as it is backing out code changes.
I like that they have local models available, I plan to try those sometime.
They’re 5th off bottom on livebench
https://livebench.ai/
Yet their transcription model is the best out there currently subjectivity.
Iirc: mistral has American investors, black forest labs hq has been moved to silicon valley.
That's another problem with the idea of tech sovereignity. Anything succesful, even if it started in Europe, will go global, including literally going to the USA
If the political regime in the US continues, that will come to an end. You can see it happening already - London has been a big beneficiary of Trump’s agenda.
Hub and spoke market model of the world. Some realities can not change. could move back to britain-canada though.
Used to be much more distributed before WWII, or even before the dotcom boom. SV looks like an unstoppable vortex for everything high tech, to the point it becomes a security risk for everyone else
Basically every company has American investors. But for Mistral, ASML is the biggest, I think, and the french founders also still hold significant amounts.
And Black Forest labs is still headquartered in Freiburg, Germany. They just have a lab in SF.
That's why the European way to tech sovereignty is (publicly-funded) free software. Cannot be bought by unlimited VC money from The Valley, and it benefits the rest of the world, which is a tiny drop, and hence a necessary one, in Europe offsetting the damages of colonization, past and present.
Free software alone doesn't give you tech sovereignty. What matters is who integrates and runs the software.
Can you explain how you mean this? Obviously, it helps if the knowledge of the codebase is with a trusted partner. But taking as an example Grist (https://getgrist.org), which is developed by a NY-based US company and is part of the French La suite numérique (LSN). Should a geopolitical reason get in the way of Grist devs further collaborating with LSN, don't you think that France's sovereignty is safeguarded by the availability of the code?
Granted, it'd be a setback. But nothing a couple of dedicated French devs could not tackle.
What am I missing?
Far more usable (and older AFAIK) site: https://european-alternatives.eu/
Very different sites with very different goals.
I think this post is useful if you are, say, a European that wants to find a nearby tech company to work for or are curious where the tech "scene" is at in Europe
And correctly named: 'European' instead of 'EU'!
(yes, I see the .eu domain but that's minor)
There are existing sites like https://www.goeuropean.org/
Based on the creator of EU Tech Map having an AI-powered advertising company and the mistakes in the entries, I assume the site was populated using LLMs. For example, LibreOffice is incorrectly listed as being closed source, SaaS and paid: https://eutechmap.com/company/libreoffice
It took a minute to load the map points here, and I was sitting thinking this is an attempt at a clever joke
There are no european alternatives. These are all european companies but they dont benefit the whole union.
If a germany company gets big it will eat other european markets leaving nothing in those markets and then beg Merz for more immigrants to Germany instead of hiring other europeans.
Stop being racist. Immigrants are given the lowest level type of jobs which nobody wants to do anymore. Others are then prospering to better jobs. That's how you keep the economy growing.
It's not 2015 any more, people aren't buying that any more. Nuance is allowed in the discussion
Buying exactly what? Bus and taxi drivers, people working in the supermarkets, in the low cost stores, food chains, delivery services, call agent support, then the workers in the industry plants etc etc
Are you suggesting that locals are doing that type of work?
Apologies, I have the flu and totally misread the meaning. Ignore me
But I can move freely to Germany and get employed there as an EU citizen. Or, my competitors in the job market do, leaving more jobs for men And taxes pain in Germany also goes to the common EU budget. So the success of a German company also benefits me in another EU country.
Isn’t the relationship exactly the same as a company in my country, but another town? I could also gripe that jobs in that other town will not pay my municipality’s taxes.
The title is wrong as they only included EU/EEA/EFTA/UK companies, at least according to their faq page. Which would exclude multiple balkan countries and some others.
They need to fix the addresses. In Stockholm, all of the companies are placed in the old town. At Hopsworks, we are in Sodermalm (hipster) - we are not old school money.
Was just looking at the map thinking: have the all moved to Gamla stan? :)
The Paris addresses are definitely not correct, some may be, but the cluster near the Seine in the centre doesn't match where offices generally exist
European startups, when they are successful, will eventually end up being bought by Oracle or move to USA. Such is life.
The European digital scene isn't a pipeline problem; it's an institutional 'safe harbor' problem. We have world-class publicly funded research and education, and the talent, just look at the startup floor at Vivatech or WebSummit, but European Private Equity and late-stage capital remain structurally locked into 'Old Economy' models.
In Europe, valuation is still largely tied to tangible assets and steady EBITDA. This creates a massive 'Patient Capital' gap. While US investors have evolved to price the long-term unit economics of digital scaling, where high initial burn is the cost of building a global moat, European private equity remains culturally risk-averse. They prefer the predictable, incremental returns of a specialized factory over the 'winner-takes-most' volatility of digital platforms. By prioritizing collateral over code, our domestic capital is effectively subsidizing the past rather than financing the future. That's our problem.
Well said. Another factor that nobody in the EU likes to talk about is regulations like worker protections that make it hard to do layoffs. Such regulations are popular but they strongly favor large predictable companies over startups.
No economy has both: (1) a predictable investment and work environment, and (2) a vibrant technology sector. You make your choices and you live with them.
Is Spotify US based? They did get listed on the NY Exchange but I think they are still headquartered in Sweden. Not that one example says much but if true, at least one tech giant managed to not succumb to American capital.
Perhaps attitudes will shift. Trying to type with a straight face: maybe the investors/owners will have a conscience and not sell out to the US
If you are going to post a link to a site like this, please also say what point the link is making.
not all that useful. for a more useful alternative I'd prefer to see companies up from a certain size (I've noticed some small startups on the map) and if the're (not) using aws/azure/gcp/chinaCloud (whatever the names are).
Right, the page starts up and shows them in alphabetical order. Didn't recognize a single one.
I briefly went thought the list - a lot of hosted systems (probably kubernetes underneath etc). This is not unique or anything.
The list is quite sus ;) did you know that cockroachdb is a German company? :) it’s in the list. And this is like 3rd company in the category that I was checking
https://eutechmap.com/company/cockroachdb
——
On more sad note.
Europe still loves their old money, (hidden) class system and deeply entrenched bureaucracy way too much to allow some plebs to get rich that quickly.
European way of doing things to me feels like fundamentally incompatible with high pace way of doing things in software area.
Personally, I don’t believe that anything significant can come up from places other than US or China. About 10 years ago Russians were doing a lot of “own” stuff (clickhouse comes to mind first), but I suspect that isolation and brain drain will eventually capture them.
Asml is a European company. Arm (was) a European company. Novo Nordisk is a European company.
It’s ludicrous to pretend important ideas only come from the US and China.
Most of the interesting programming languages come from Europe (OCaml, Haskell, Idris, Gleam these days). We're not short on ideas.
Yes we're not that good at creating mega-businesses. And when we manage, said businesses quickly run to the US.
> And when we manage, said businesses quickly run to the US.
See Linus/Linux. But I think we still have Minix in EU.
I mentioned software, but didn’t said that I specifically focus on it.
Asml, arm, novo - neither of them are software companies. From what I’ve seen asml wouldn’t work without zeiss, another European company.
This still doesn’t invalidate my premise that software landscape is completely and totally dominated by us/Chinese companies, except probably gaming, where couple of hits can make a studio from any country a world class player, like CD Project Red
The fact is that Europe is a lot of things. You have the British class system (not that hidden), you have French and German bureaucracy, but you also have the unique combination of egalitarianism and mercantilism in Scandinavia and the Netherlands, and the zeal of Polish progressivism, shared by a number of their former east block neighbors.
There are places in Europe where you can easily achieve a higher standard of living (on average) than the US, and there are places where you can't.
I believe the reason that Europe is behind on commercial software is just economic: Solid, standardized solutions were available coming from US companies, and they were seen as low-risk for decades, so why would any company try to compete? Network effects apply to things like office suites and e-mail clients just as much as social media. Microsoft doesn't have any serious US or Chinese competitors in this space either.
That's not to say there aren't problems: The pipeline from startup to big tech firm is extremely difficult in Europe, largely because capital is much more conservative, stemming from the fact that European capital tends to be concentrated in things like pension funds. For years, successful European tech startups have at some point or another hooked into the US Bay Area ecosystem (capital, talent pool, etc.), because the local environment was way too risk-averse.
But I think you, like many, have succumbed to anti-European propaganda, which comes in a couple of forms: pro-corporatist, pro-Putinist, orientalist/sinophile, etc.
The capital situation is especially dumb. There's been a lot of debate recently in Denmark about why our pension funds invest a lot of money in US venture capital funds that then invest in Danish startups that have moved to the Bay Area. The same money could have been invested in the same startups here in Europe.
we live in an age where manufacturing of any kind, software, ai rule the world, and EUs output there is shrinking.
I think that in current day and age EU feels entitled to disproportionately higher standards of living to its output.
And given that, EUs awakening will be the rudest. US’s is going to be too, but different
I don’t want to share some personal grievances, but my negative perspective on EU (esp Germany) is from personal experience. I don’t think that I succumbed to propaganda and I’m certainly not a fan of P or X
If you think AI rules the world you've certainly succumbed to propaganda.
I am not thinking about ChatGPT but robotics now advances with crazy speed
EU tech alternative is FLOSS, not copy the model someone else did earlier and better. As an EU Citizen I reject the initiatives of the Commission, which moreover, is not elected but appointed through a mechanism where the will of the people never plays a part, whose goals are the sinicization of the EU and its destruction for partisan interests against ours.
To have a sovereign IT sector, we must ENFORCE FLOSS and open hardware in no uncertain terms, rather than copying Big Tech.
we need european chip makers.
ASML is European and is arguably the most strategically important company in the entire semiconductor supply chain.
ASML Holding is dominating the chip technology with their machines. It's not the lack of invention or intellectual capability that holds Europe back from the digital industry, it's the lack of willing long term European invenstors. If you want to scale your digital tech startup in Europe the most viable way is to look to the US for investors.
ASML is not a chip maker, it is a chip-maker maker. Still important though.
Europe should request a discount for ASML machines in a EU factory.
The hardware is in europe. The IP and control is in USA
I think that it would require there to be a European chip demand. Today that demand is almost entirely for cars, so we only get mediocre car infotainment chips (+ a few other similar niches). There was more hope 20 years ago, when there were widely successful European mobile phone makers.
To be fair, there is ESMC now which is being built out in collaboration (read major involvment) of TSMC.
https://www.esmc.eu/en/index.html
Hi all! I’m the person behind EU Tech Map.
First of all, thank you Puppion for posting here! Was happy to see EU Tech Map being talked about on one the most interesting corners of the web.
A few things upfront:
1) What the site is (and isn’t)
The goal is to make it easier to discover European tech companies (EU/EEA/EFTA/UK for now) and, where relevant, find alternatives to commonly used tools. It’s not attempting to claim “we have a European Google/Amazon/Nvidia” today. It’s a directory that helps people answer: “If I want a European vendor in category X, who exists and where are they based?”
2) Accuracy concerns are fair
A couple of you pointed out incorrect entries (LibreOffice classification, CockroachDB origin, etc.). Those are real issues and I’m fixing them. The site is only as useful as the trust people can place in the data.
What I’m doing in the near-term:
- Adding source/provenance per field (HQ, license model, pricing model, category, etc.) so it’s obvious what’s confirmed vs inferred.
- Tightening the validation rules (e.g. OSS status should never be wrong for well-known projects).
- Making it easier to submit corrections and see what changed.
- If you spot bad entries, the most helpful thing you can do is drop the company page + what’s wrong + a source (official docs/site/Wikipedia is fine). I’ll prioritize the ones mentioned here first.
3) The map clustering / addresses
Yep — geocoding is currently too naive in some cases (a few cities end up pinned centrally). That’s being addressed by improving address parsing and allowing companies to set a more accurate location when they claim their page.
4) Performance
The slow load and delayed map pins are on me. I’m already working on:
- better caching
- loading pins progressively
- reducing initial payload
- a simpler “list-first” mode for people who don’t care about the map
5) “Why not use existing sites?”
There are great lists out there. Some focus on product alternatives, some on buy-European movements, some on OSS. This one is trying to combine “ecosystem discovery” (who exists, where, what they do) with “alternatives” browsing. If it ends up redundant, it’ll deserve to lose.
6) Sovereignty / nationalism
I’m not trying to sell nationalism or “Europe first because vibes.” People have different reasons for caring: procurement rules, data residency, risk management, legal exposure, preference for local support, or simply curiosity about the EU tech scene. The directory is just an information layer. Use it if it helps, ignore it if it doesn’t.
Finally, appreciate both the feedback and to some degree criticism — if this becomes genuinely useful, it’ll be because people here kept the quality bar high.
I built this as a hobby project myself and launched it "for fun" just 3 days ago, and it has really exploded online, more than I would ever anticipate. So, please bear with me as I'm working day and night to improve the site.
Super grateful for everyone input! / Dante
Peak EU mindset thinking all we need is a nifty little map application to find alternatives.
Meanwhile, tech companies are continuing to bail into the US the moment they reach significant revenue due to crushing tax and labour costs (see e.g. Oura announcing their departure from Finland yesterday)
Unfortunately the EU and many local governments have chosen to double down on crippling socialism (presumedly to "own Trump") so this continue at an accelerating pace.
> labour costs
Where in the EU is a software engineer paid SV FAANG rates?
> Oura announcing their departure from Finland yesterday
The article I read said they were moving their HQ domicile to Delaware in preparation for a US stock market listing. A bit like US companies do. It said firmly that roughly half of its staff were already in the US, half in Finland, and that wasn't going to change.
> Where in the EU is a software engineer paid SV FAANG rates?
Maybe Switzerland but regardless I agree - it is the labour cost that _attracted_ US companies to plant their labs across Europe and not vice versa.
I tried to find on that website the equivalents of Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, TSMC, Nvidia, OpenAI, Meta, Broadcom, Oracle but didn't succeed.
Zoom in Veldhoven and then try to see the equivalent of ASML anywhere else.
This is not the flex it could be. As far as I know ASML licensed their core tech from US research. Which is why they can dictate who ASML sells to.
That's nonsense. Why is there no ASML in the US then?
I made two assertions and I believe both are true. You seem to be stretching what I said to some form of "and ASML has done nothing else on top", which I didn't say. Maybe I should reduce "their core tech" to EUV, but that's clearly what I meant if you look up the history of the company.
No, I just didn't find any evidence that ASML licences "their core tech" from US. Let it be EUV but I still can't find any sources on it. Do you have some?
You can paste that comment exactly as you wrote it into any search engine or LLM and get your answer.
The burden of proof is on you my friend.
Good. You can keep most of those, we don't want them.
Imagine a food version: "I don't see a McDonalds equivalent!". Good, you can keep that obesity-supporting fast-food crap, we (those without the addiction) don't want it.
“Tech alternatives” yet a good portion of the companies I randomly clicked on are software services/outsourcing, especially on the eastern side.
Show me a European iPhone, European Microsoft, European Nvidia, etc. Hell, I’ll take a European one man company that can reach all 27 markets.
Europe needs a single market for capital and the removal of legal barriers to extend across the continent, foremost for the little guy. Von der Failen can only add _more_ regulation. Someone wake me when they actually make something easier.
Feels like you're addressing two different topics in one comment.
Legally speaking, a one person company can address the whole EEA market. From a marketing/sales standpoint yeah, sure, it's probably hard to address culturally different markets like Portugal, Poland and Sweden.
But it does not have much to do with regulations, especially not ones decided at the EU level.
I'm all for better integration but diverse cultures are here to stay....
Sample size of one, but done business in Italy, Spain, Belgium, France, Switzerland and Germany: main issues were not regulation related...
Have you heard of a little company called Arm Holdings?
It was a travesty that the UK government let it be sold, admittedly.
UK isn't European. They made that clear when they voted for Brexit.
We are. Do you think someone dragged the whole country to new location?
Norway, Iceland and Switzerland are also not in the EU. Are they also on a different continent?
UK is European. Membership of EU is unnecessary for that criterion to be met.
The UK is not in the EU, but it is surely european.
I bet EU bureaucrats would love to dictate their redefinition of "European".
The UK is no longer in the EU; The UK is still in Europe and is very much European.
Yeah. Not sure if it's the intention, but what this site really shows is "the lack of European tech alternatives."
I believe the EU inc initiative attempts to fix the capital aspect
It’s just a shortcut for broken Germany to be able to found a company without a notary and 25000EUR.
That is false. You can absolutely found a company by just getting an entry as a merchant here with neither of the things you listed. If you want to found a limited liability company though, then yes, you need some monetary backing to cover for fuckups (likely the 25k are not fully covering it anyway) and a notary to make it official.
No, you CANNOT found a company like that. It’s an absolute fabrication.
You also seem to somehow justify spending 25k on an endeavor you don’t know will succeed upfront, when every other country on the planet allows you to open one with orders of magnitude smaller amounts of capital.
You can open a UK LTD in a few days with 12GBP. Similar in DK/NL/CZ… the list goes on.
I’ve learned firsthand that germans will bend over backwards to justify this insanity.
Needing to put in >1000 EUR in starting capital is not uncommon. The "cheapest Danish limited liability company, the Aps needs 20k DKK up front, i.e. ~3000 EUR. In Sweden an AB needs 25k SEK, ~2300 EUR.
And you can always dissolve the company and take the capital out again tax free, so what's the big deal?
> No, you CANNOT found a company like that. It’s an absolute fabrication.
I'm a German. I have done this myself. I assure you it's true.
> You also seem to somehow justify spending 25k on an endeavor you don’t know will succeed upfront, when every other country on the planet allows you to open one with orders of magnitude smaller amounts of capital.
If you are planning a serious endeavour where you intend to limit your liability, you'll have a business plan. And that allows multiple options, from a bank loan of a local bank that will very likely be granted on good conditions, to one of the various municipal, regional, or federal programs that offer grants for newly founded companies. My current company secured 200k Euro at the beginning from a federal program that we did not have to pay back, for example.
You are clearly misinformed. According to German law, you can start a UG (limited) with only 1€ + notary cost. Starting a business with personal liability doesn't cost anything.
Businesses with personal liability don't count. They might as well not exist. AG or nothing.
It's beyond me why anyone would downvote that. An UG is uninvestable, and a GmbH would also scare most investors. Anything but an AG is not going to work.
What are you talking about..? A GmbH is the German equivalent of an Ltd. An AG is a publicly traded company and thus not something investors are looking for. Also, the majority of companies in Germany are just ordinary eigetragene Kaufmänner (so normal businesspeople like your average plumber), or GmbH (literally any other company that isn’t a stock market traded enterprise).
So there are of course a lot of large EU based IT/tech companies but I guess you already know this.
As for leaders, von der Leyen might not be the best but still lightyears better than the orange pedo in the wh.
There are many many degrees of harm before the extreme. They can both suck at the same time.
How about European ASML?
> Europe needs a single market for capital and the removal of legal barriers to extend across the continent, foremost for the little guy.
?!?
You can trivially sell your software inside the EU. As for software that I use almost daily: OsmAnd. LanguageTool, which is spell-checking this message, is made in Germany. IntelliJ products are made in Czechia, and I'm using them right now.
You can sell products anywhere but you’re battling 27 different sets of rules and legislations. Look at how a burger shop becomes a continent wide franchise overnight and you’ll see how that’s impossible in the EU.
We just lack the regulatory freedom and deep financial markets, access to credit, etc.
A burger shop is a hard example. Software is trivial. Distribution of goods is no harder than the US and its sales tax regime, that is different in all 50 states and can be different in each county inside that state. In EU you can use the One Stop Shop.
There are 50 different sets of regulations in the US though and lately even federal regulations have been "changeable" shall we say from year to year.
Just ask Moderna
In the US you're battling 51 different rules and legislations, plus the countless county and city legislations if you're shipping or doing anything physical. The EU is better.
If you're selling software that needs to _battle_ 27 different rules, then you're doing something seriously wrong.
I don't know why this is held up as some insurmountable challenge: every US state has different laws, if you sell any software to solve business problems you'll be dealing with 50 different legal codes and regulations you have to support too.
>Show me a European iPhone, European Microsoft, European Nvidia, etc.
The "avoid dependence on the US" movement only really started picking up steam with Trump's accelerating dementia in his second term.
The iPhone, Microsoft, and nVidia all took multiple decades to develop into the behemoths they are today. Famously, the first iPhone was actually expensive trash: no apps, no 3G, couldn't even cut and paste text. It wasn't until the 3G model and the App Store that it became a true success.
> Famously, the first iPhone was actually expensive trash: no apps, no 3G, couldn't even cut and paste text.
Also famously, while the tech elitists complained about all of its shortcomings, the broader consumer market fully embraced it and it single-handedly drove an entirely new generation of consumer electronics.
I wouldn’t say trash.
For the record, it let you read the same web pages as a desktop computer over WiFi. It had a usable mapping app and good music app.
The rest of the experience, stuff like alarms, calculator, address book, etc. also worked nicely.
Those turned out to be things no one else was offering. I had a Nokia N95 at the time and the original iPhone was a big improvement on everything except the camera.
Yes, as I wrote initially: the iPhone is a behemoth today, but its first version was underwhelming to say the least.
My point, which you seem to have overlooked, is that parent poster complaining that a "european iphone" doesn't exist is not realistic, considering how it went for Apple.
The consumer market embraced it despite its shortcomings because it looked nice and was easy to use; the alternatives were not. Yeah, it didn't do that much, but it did more than a flip phone. The alternatives wanted you to use a stylus just to use your phone, and tried to basically recreate the MS Windows UI on a tiny screen; their UI was terrible.
I had a flip phone at the time and it certainly did more than the iPhone, but admittedly harder to use and not as good looking.
Realistically, what you're asking for won't happen unless there's a strong push for Federalisation.
Unfortunately, most Eastern Bloc countries are led into the false belief that the EU is encroaching on their ways of life and "making them eat ze bugs", and the Brussels elite is more concerned with using their slim remaining political capital to push restrictions on internet freedoms rather than federalisation.
Yes, precisely. Going federal is the only viable l, unified, way ahead.
Over the last 20 years, Europe has become irrelevant.
There is not a single European LLM on the same level as US or Chinese models. France's Mistral reached 400M in revenue, but I believe it could have been more relevant if the EU had not slowed everything down with overregulation.
Why does Europe need to dump hundreds of billions of dollars into developing a chatbot that will never be able to pay off its debts? Mistral seems like a much more practical and sustainable approach to LLM development than centering the entire economy around a pyramid scheme predicated on selling the belief that AGI is always three months away.
China's LLM development relative to resources spent is impressive, but it also happened to be predicated on Chinese miners buying into the previous pyramid scheme and having a lot of GPUs on hand already. I don't think the lack of European commitment to the previous pyramid scheme putting it a bit behind in that regard indicates any kind of grand regional failure, so much as an event of pure circumstance that probably has little lasting meaning 5 or 10 years from now.
You lost all your credibility if you see AI as "a chatbot".
Conversely, every person calling LLMs "agents" never had any credibility to begin with. Despite my many attempts to coerce an example out of people here, I am still waiting for one (1) singular demonstration of "agentic software" that is capable of replacing production-grade software at scale. Software created by agents that solves a real-world problem and is used by tens of thousands or millions of people. Candidates include an OS, a web browser, an IDE, image editing software akin to Photoshop, a fully-featured Discord/Slack/etc. replacement, a non-trivial video game, music production software, enterprise-grade database software etc., really anything that isn't just another AI tool to produce another AI tool to produce another AI tool culminating in complete psychosis and detachment from anything people do in the real world. If you would like to be the first to provide evidence that these things are more capable than chatbots in concrete terms, by all means, go ahead.
LLMs as chatbots are the least interesting application of LLMs.
I build agents for banks for a living and can tell you for sure that you are wrong.
We have been overly reliant on non-European partners we could trust and rely on. That is now gone. So right now is a good opportunity for Europe to focus inward. Imagine having all the social benefits AND tech. We also need to make sure keep malignant actors like the USA & Russia at bay. One can dream.
Yes, I agree. But it was Europe that has become complacent and lazy. "Doing good" is more important than "doing right". As a result, with energy prices high, dependence on Russia only increased, and car manufacturers (Stellantis, Mercedes -50% revenue) are dying as have shipbuilders before them.
Dependence on Russia is quite sharply down. In Q1 2022 the EU imported 63 billion EUR worth of goods from Russia, in Q3 2025 only 5.7 billion. So down 90%.
In terms of fossil fuels:
- Russia isn't even in the top 6 oil supplies of the EU. The top 6 are USA, Norway, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, Libya and Iraq. They make up ~60% of EU oil imports.
- In raw natural gas: Norway, Algeria, UK and Azerbaijan supply 81% of EU imports.
- In liquefied natural gas: USA, Qatar and Algeria supply 68% of EU imports.
Add to that Dutch and Danish North Sea oil and gas and it's evident the EU is not "dependent" on Russia.
Russian propaganda is strong in you, little padawan.
I am old enough to remember variations of this conversation from 20 years ago. If you scratch, you always find ideology underneath: an antipathy for regulation that puts people before money and for sharing the cost of social safety nets. I like living in Europe. It's not perfect (what is), but it's pretty good. Living my life well vs. worrying about my country not buying enough GPUs to keep the markets excited? Choices, choices...
IMHO the EU is the best place to live if you're a rank-and-file worker, and the US is the best place to live if you're ambitious.
EU integration brings some advantages but it also becomes harder to experiment. Ideally you'd have a few member states vying to become the Shenzhen of Europe but that won't happen under EU integration.
That assumes LLMs are relevant and will be around a year from now. Let’s not forget NFTs.
Your comment is also blind to the absurd amount of research and projects which are born here but later move to look for funding.
So the EU is not irrelevant, on the contrary, we’re just mourning the fall of the US and transitioning to an independent future. Who would’ve though, we’d end up needing to build a copy of everything…
> That assumes LLMs are relevant and will be around a year from now. Let’s not forget NFTs.
These two things are not alike. At all.
I used it as another “there was a strong tech push but ultimately we couldn’t make it work” kind of idea. With NFTs the grift was immediately visible, with LLMs it’s a bit harder, the whole “AI” facade gives people hope - I want to believe and stuff.
" we’re just mourning the fall of the US ".
Listen to Rubio's speech again.
The EU is in a managed decline, and no number of migrants will change that.
Rubio is a mouthpiece for a regime that’s not qualified to discuss Europe, or even his very own US of A. All he meant in his speech is that his government has chosen isolation
Just look at the space industry. Europe doesn't even have a proper space port.
The Guiana Space Centre isn't a proper space port? Guyane is a region of France, just like Normandy or Pays de la Loire or the 15 others.
I’ve raised money here and there. Never really had issues with the EU regulations.
But the lack of risk capital and investor brainpower has been a huge problem.
Yes, Europe is not as relevant in the unhealthy toy business as the US, which is a good thing.
Using a European solution just because it’s European sounds wrong to me. Sounds like we’ve done this kind of nationalism in the past and failed. There are other reasons why Europe isn’t attractive for bringing these kinds of technologies to life, and investor money is only a small part of it. Especially in a company’s early days. Building a market reserved for mediocre tech solutions sounds like the wrong way to make Europe more independent.
Maybe Europe shouldn’t copy the nationalism, but governments should copy some of the reasons the breeding grounds in the US and China exist. Think about how they got that far, and especially how China caught up so fast.
Two counters:
1. I'm not sure China caught up so quickly due to any lack of nationalism.
2. There's an allure to working with an EU business because it's in the EU because they're less likely to jerk you around. You have no idea how many times I get told their in nothing they can do, then have to drop the 'I live in the EU and this is illegal' card, and magically the problem is resolved by the next email.
> Using a European solution just because it’s European sounds wrong to me.
That depends who you are, and what you are doing. If you have information stored such that having it in US infrastructure is a national security risk, then you might think differently.
>but governments should copy some of the reasons the breeding grounds in the US and China exist.
Which reasons should they copy? Massive government subsidies? Large grants masquerading as defence contracts? Threatening foreign governments to force market access with taxation lower than the native businesses? Are you saying European governments should favour European companies just because they are European?
> Which reasons should they copy? Massive government subsidies? Large grants masquerading as defence contracts? Threatening foreign governments to force market access with taxation lower than the native businesses? Are you saying European governments should favour European companies just because they are European?
The US and China pulling all this shit is exactly why the whole European alternatives thing is trending. Before Trump started threatening everyone, we had no problem using US tech.
I think that it's more a case of "Before Trump started threatening everyone, there were problems with using US tech but we chose to ignore them because it was too hard to do anything about it"
To my reading the US, despite the 'safe harbour' assurances, has never been somewhere that European people's data should have been sent, because we know that the US requires its companies to give access to that data on demand, usually secretly. So any assurances that data is entirely confidential are meaningless.
It's one of the reasons I was so incensed with gov.uk using google analytics and Zendesk (even though Zendesk has its origins in Denmark, it's now based in SF). Their pleadings that 'data is anonymised by google' were not reassuring at all, and it constitutes a complete record of UK citizen interactions with their own government, handed over to a US company on a silver platter.
At least now people are thinking about this stuff a bit more.
Europe isn't a nation.
And the whole point here is a more diverse alternative to the extreme dependency on the US tech companies
Nothing is a nation- but something bundled together by hardship. Europe is in for hardship.
>Building a market reserved for mediocre tech solutions sounds like the wrong way to make Europe more independent.
The traction which is proverbial "wind in the sails" for further development must come from somewhere. A new promotional channel might help with it.
Also I don't think it's any kind on nationalism. Just pragmatism for the very unstable times.
I think the depths of the answers here, particularly with China, are far beyond the scope of technical discussion and to be honest likely beyond the scope of European-specific tech needs. Just because the US did one thing a certain way, and China did it another way; doesn't mean Europe must follow either of those to be successful.
However, it is going to require public funds to achieve. A public/private partnership scenario is very likely at least the near to mid term future for European tech development. And the world can only stand to benefit.
Politically, nationalism is absolutely very bad and it's a shame the world is headed in this direction. This global distrust only serves chaos agents and accelerates us into another World War (if we aren't already in the early stages of one). I had hope that people would prefer to come together but it's unfortunately too risky with US politics.
> and especially how China caught up so fast.
Isn't that largely nationalism and pressuring companies to use (initially) mediocre local tech solutions though? Once the market is there, quality catches up rapidly.
Creating mediocre alternatives sometimes pave the way for real alternatives as you create a talent pool.
China is an example, countries that had become technology independent through sanctions is another
> especially how China caught up so fast.
Nationalism, but armed with actual law enforcement and economical support instead of good intentions and lip service.
> There are other reasons why Europe isn’t attractive for bringing these kinds of technologies to life, and investor money is only a small part of it.
And what are these other reasons?
> Building a market reserved for mediocre tech solutions sounds like the wrong way to make Europe more independent.
You can’t foster excellence if you don’t reward it monetarily (enough).
No unified capital markets, no high reward as an investor.
As an employer/employee takes a year to fire people even when they don’t show up, ergo the incentive is to coast.
As a founder you’re buried in bureaucracy and taxes, so the incentive is to stay an employee.
It’s a trifecta of shit.
> a year to fire people even when they don’t show up
In what country? I just checked, in France it's 15 days. The employer can ask to be paid the notice period, and the employee won't get unemployment benefits.
> As an employer/employee takes a year to fire people even when they don’t show up, ergo the incentive is to coast.
That is not true in the UK. In the first two years of service you can fire someone without a reason so long as you were not being deliberately discriminatory. Burden of proof on the employee for this
After that you just have to go through a fair process. Your decision is not in question, just whether you followed a fair process. I have worked in a place that routinely fired people for being 1 minute late on three occasions. Late once, verbal warning, late twice, written warning, late three times fired.
> As a founder you’re buried in bureaucracy and taxes, so the incentive is to stay an employee.
As a sole trader in the UK you can set up instantly. You have 3 months to let the tax authority know what you did, but no real threat if you leave it a bit longer. Setting up a corporate entity takes 10 minutes online. You can have that done by your accountant and the annual accounts done for maybe £300. No need for an audit until you have cross 2 out of three of these thresholds
Annual turnover of no more than £15 million
Gross assets of no more than £7.5 million
Average number of employees of no more than 50
Immediately you get a significant tax advantage over employees.
Easy access to capital is harder, unless you went to high-end private school that is. Development capital is not that hard to get, but seed funding is harder.
> takes a year to fire people even when they don’t show up
Just curious: where did you hear this propaganda?