There’s a manifesto on this site. It’s the official strategic positioning document — the kind of thing you write because procurement teams will read it. This is the unofficial version.
The thing that made me write the first commit
I was in a meeting in late 2025 with a German friend who runs a 40-person SaaS company in Berlin. She’d just finished a procurement review with a Mittelstand customer who’d added a new clause to their contract: “All real-time team communication tooling used by the supplier in the course of fulfilling this contract must be hosted in the European Union by an EU-incorporated entity.”
Her team uses Slack. Slack is hosted in the United States by an American company. There’s an EU data-residency option, but EU data residency is not the same as EU sovereignty — the company is still American, the legal jurisdiction is still American, and the CLOUD Act still reaches the data.
She asked me, half-joking, if I knew of an alternative.
I did not. I knew of self-hosted alternatives — Mattermost, Rocket.Chat — but those require the buyer to operate the server, which my friend’s 40-person company was not going to do. Operationally that’s a half-time job for someone, and “half a security engineer” is not a line item in a 40-person SaaS budget. I knew of “EU-region toggles” on US clouds, which she correctly didn’t accept. And I knew of nothing in the gap.
The gap was the entire missing thing: managed, sovereign, modern team chat, run by a European company. That is the company I started.
The thing I had to convince myself of
The strategic question is not “is the gap real?” — it obviously is. The question is “is the gap big enough?” Most market gaps are gaps because the addressable market isn’t worth filling. Plenty of European companies are happy on Slack. Plenty more are happy on Microsoft Teams because it came bundled with Office. Discord is fine for the kind of B2B teams that started small and unstructured.
What changed — what I think changed — is that the procurement question is moving from voluntary to mandatory in chunks of the European market. The Schrems II ruling in 2020 invalidated Privacy Shield. The CLOUD Act has been on the books since 2018 and people are gradually figuring out what it means. NIS2 lands in 2024-2025 with cybersecurity requirements that flow through to vendor selection. The DSA and DMA are gradually pulling the platform-incumbent rug. And the political environment around US/EU tech alignment is, charitably, less aligned than it was five years ago.
The ten-year arc is that EU companies will increasingly be required, by their own customers and by regulators, to choose European tools for the politically loaded surfaces of their stack. Team chat is one of the most politically loaded surfaces in any stack. So is email. So are productivity suites. The chat tool is the easiest one to actually move first — channels, threads, search, files. It’s the smallest, cleanest replacement.
I don’t have to be right about any timeline. I have to be right that the gap is widening, not closing. Watching the European tech-policy news cycle in 2025 made me confident enough to write the first commit.
The thing that’s hardest to say
The hardest thing to say, as a solo founder writing the first hundred lines of a chat product in 2026, is that I am late.
Slack was founded in 2013. Mattermost in 2015. Element/Matrix in 2014. Rocket.Chat in 2015. There has been, across all of those, more than a decade of accumulated product engineering. The integration ecosystems are deep. The user expectations are calcified. The procurement playbooks are written.
I’m late. The thing I have to compete with is twelve years of compound product investment from incumbents who know exactly what I’m building.
What I have, in exchange, is the one architectural decision none of them can copy: I can be a European company. Slack cannot. Microsoft cannot. Google cannot. Discord cannot. Mattermost is owned by an American company. Rocket.Chat is owned by an American company. Element is the closest to sovereign-EU-aligned but still has a UK parent and uses the Matrix protocol’s federated economy.
A European-incorporated, European-funded, European-revenue-concentrated, EU-only-sub-processor team chat product is a position none of the incumbents can take without dismantling their corporate structure. They can compete with me on every product feature in v1.1 and v2 — and they will. They cannot compete on the architectural fact of being European. That is the only durable thing I have. So that is what I’m building toward.
The thing I want you to take from this
If you’re reading this and thinking about whether to try us — whether to migrate, whether to evaluate, whether to even open the signup page — the question I want you to ask is:
Do I want my team’s most politically loaded surface to be operationally and contractually European, or am I okay with “EU region of an American cloud” being the answer?
If you’re okay with the second answer, you have nothing to fix. Slack and Teams and Google Chat are mature, capable products. They will be there for as long as you want them to be there. I’m not going to convince you with marketing copy that you should care about something you’ve decided you don’t.
If you want the first answer, we’re built for you. The product is real, the company is real, the EU pledge is contractual, and the migration takes a weekend. The signup page is at /signup. I’d love to see your name in the user list.
— The founder, Stockholm, 2026-05-03