Sovereignty isn’t a checkbox. It’s a company decision.

European companies have been told for a decade that they could have sovereignty by clicking a region toggle on an American cloud platform. We don’t believe that. We think it’s a story the incumbents tell because the alternative — actually moving — is hard. We started OmniTeam because the alternative is also necessary.

Part I — What sovereignty isn’t

"EU data residency" on a US cloud is a configuration toggle that says the bytes will sit in a Frankfurt datacenter. It is not sovereignty. The company that owns the datacenter is American. American shareholders own its equity. American executives sign its government contracts. American courts can compel its disclosure of customer data, including from outside the US, including in secret, including over the protests of European customers, under the CLOUD Act of 2018.

"Compliance with GDPR" by a US company is a contractual promise from an entity whose home jurisdiction does not enforce GDPR. When the two legal systems disagree — and they routinely do — the US one wins, because the US one is where the company actually lives.

"Sub-processor list" published by a US SaaS company often runs to dozens of US vendors. Each is its own CLOUD Act exposure. Each is its own potential breach. Each is its own audit-trail gap. Each is one more reason to build differently.

Part II — What sovereignty is

Sovereignty is a property of the legal entity that runs the product. If that entity is incorporated in the European Union, owned by EU-resident or EU-corporate shareholders, governed under EU law, and has its primary revenue dependence within the EU — then it is operationally sovereign. If any of those conditions are missing, sovereignty is conditional and reversible.

We chose to build on this premise. OmniTeam is incorporated in the European Union, operated entirely on EU-owned infrastructure, funded entirely by EU-resident capital, with revenue concentration in EU customers. We commit contractually never to redomicile, never to be acquired by a non-EU parent without explicit customer consent, and never to depend structurally on US revenue. The EU Pledge spells this out clause by clause.

This is not a marketing posture. It is an architectural decision we cannot reverse without breaking customer contracts.

Part III — Why team chat is the right place to start

Team chat is the most casual surface in your stack and also the most politically loaded. Every business decision flows through it. Every layoff is announced there. Every contract is negotiated alongside. Every confidential strategy discussion happens there. The retention of those messages is contractually material.

It is also the surface where European companies are most exposed. Slack’s pricing is opaque, its retention is gated, its sub-processor list is heavy with US vendors, and its parent company has been breached in 2022 by attackers using stolen session cookies. Microsoft Teams is bundled with Office 365 and inherits its data politics. Google Chat is bundled with Workspace and inherits the platform that runs Google’s ad business. Mattermost is sovereign but operationally DIY, which is why most companies don’t adopt it.

We are deliberately the missing fourth option: managed, sovereign, modern, integration-rich. None of those words is decorative. Each one is a deliberate market positioning that excludes a competitor.

Part IV — What we’re building

On launch day, OmniTeam is a Slack-grade product on EU-owned infrastructure. Channels, threads, search, multi-account on every client (the bug Slack has never fixed on web), passkey login by default, audit log enforced at the database layer, ISO 27001 in flight, SOC 2 on the roadmap, full message retention with no 90-day artificial cap, and a public sub-processor list that fits on a postcard.

In v1.1, we ship the Public API, webhooks, bots, and integration ecosystem — committed to that timeline as an architectural decision documented up front. The schema is designed forward. We are not speculating; we are sequencing.

In v2 we add E2EE channels using the MLS protocol (RFC 9420), voice and video via federated sovereign-EU media services, and the policy primitives that regulated industries need (DLP, retention by content type, structured legal-hold). E2EE is a tradeoff with real costs to chat usability — server-side search, mobile push previews, history on a new device — and we’ll be honest about those tradeoffs in the UI rather than pretending they don’t exist.

Part V — What we won’t do

Reading "what we won’t do" is more honest than reading a values page.

We will not run a phone-support line. We will not schedule sales-discovery calls. We will not gate enterprise features behind a sales human. Every tier — including SSO, SCIM, audit, custom DPA — is self-serve and visible-priced. If your procurement team needs a redlined DPA, that happens by email.

We will not ship ads, will not monetize message metadata, will not train AI on customer messages without explicit per-feature opt-in with audit trail of who enabled it. We will not embed third-party analytics SDKs in the customer-facing surface. We will not phone home from the desktop or mobile clients on launch.

We will not raise US-only venture capital. We will not open a US sales office. We will not pursue the US enterprise market as a primary growth path. We will not be acquired by a non-EU parent without explicit customer right of termination. These are not opinions. They are contractual commitments — see the EU Pledge.

Part VI — A specific invitation

If you’re a European founder, IT lead, or procurement officer reading this, the question we’d like you to consider is not "would OmniTeam be cheaper than Slack?" The answer to that is yes.

The question we’d like you to consider is: do you want your team’s chat — the most political surface in your stack — to be operationally and contractually European? If yes, we’re built for you. If no, no amount of marketing copy will move you, and you should stay where you are. We’re looking for the customers who think the question matters.

You can create a workspace in 60 seconds. You can read the security model, the trust center, and the EU pledge first. Whichever order you prefer.