European Tech Alternatives(eutechmap.com) |
European Tech Alternatives(eutechmap.com) |
> 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
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!
Cyberspace depends on physical reality and everything that comes from that. Resource constraints, economics, politics, arms races, warfare, etc.
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.
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.
The surplus binges of the 90s do not make for an accurate sample of human and politics nature.
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.
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.
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
(yes, I see the .eu domain but that's minor)
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
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.
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.
To have a sovereign IT sector, we must ENFORCE FLOSS and open hardware in no uncertain terms, rather than copying Big Tech.
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.
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 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.
Europe should request a discount for ASML machines in a EU factory.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe Goodram can then assemble their chips into consumer products? :-)
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.
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 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.
And Black Forest labs is still headquartered in Freiburg, Germany. They just have a lab in SF.
It’s ludicrous to pretend important ideas only come from the US and China.
Yes we're not that good at creating mega-businesses. And when we manage, said businesses quickly run to the US.
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
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.
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
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...
It was a travesty that the UK government let it be sold, admittedly.
> 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.
We just lack the regulatory freedom and deep financial markets, access to credit, 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.
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.
As for leaders, von der Leyen might not be the best but still lightyears better than the orange pedo in the wh.
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.
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.
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.
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…
These two things are not alike. At all.
Listen to Rubio's speech again.
The EU is in a managed decline, and no number of migrants will change that.
But the lack of risk capital and investor brainpower has been a huge problem.
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.
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?
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.
And the whole point here is a more diverse alternative to the extreme dependency on the US tech companies
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.
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.
China is an example, countries that had become technology independent through sanctions is another
Nationalism, but armed with actual law enforcement and economical support instead of good intentions and lip service.
And what are these other reasons?
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.
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.
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.
Just curious: where did you hear this propaganda?
See Linus/Linux. But I think we still have Minix in EU.
Norway, Iceland and Switzerland are also not in the EU. Are they also on a different continent?
Granted, it'd be a setback. But nothing a couple of dedicated French devs could not tackle.
What am I missing?
Just ask Moderna
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.
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.
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.
Are you suggesting that locals are doing that type of work?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And you can always dissolve the company and take the capital out again tax free, so what's the big deal?
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.
We're talking about VC investing here, not your local currywurst kiosk.
> An AG is a publicly traded company
Falsch. An Aktiengesellschaft is a corporate form that protects the investors and mandates a certain formal governance and management structure. It has nothing to do with being publicly traded.
For the same reasons, VCs will be very wary of investing in a Delaware S Corp (similar to a GmbH) instead of the preferred C corp (similar to an AG), even if the company is fully private and has no revenue.
> 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).
Irrelevant.
It is, in most cases. Tell me about a startup that started off as an Aktiengesellschaft as opposed to a GmbH? Why would you even want to put 50k in instead of 25k, deal with all the governance overhead and reporting duties? It makes no sense at all, and during all the VC conversations I had, never once was a GmbH mentioned as problematic.
> Irrelevant.
It's not to the claim that you cannot found a company in Germany without putting down a significant amount of money and a notary. You just moved the goalposts.
AG is required for going public, however it's not a legal requirement that only public companies do so. You're mistaking cause and effect.
> Tell me about a startup that started off as an Aktiengesellschaft as opposed to a GmbH? Why would you even want to put 50k in instead of 25k, deal with all the governance overhead and reporting duties?
This is one of the big problems with German companies, and the reason why even German founders will start directly as a Delaware company instead. The capital requirements are $100 and reporting very minimal.
> It's not to the claim that you cannot found a company in Germany without putting down a significant amount of money and a notary.
I claimed that a non-AG makes it uninvestable, not what you're saying here (which is the product of your imagination). A GbmH has strict requirements that adding a new owner (an investor) must be done in front of a notary, and if your angel investors are all over Europe or the world, you'll have to tell them that they either they have to fly to Germany or find a German lawyer and give the lawyer a PoA. That's way too much hassle for most people, and the result is you'll hear a polite "no thanks, I might reconsider if you move your company to US/UK/Singapore". At least investing in an AG can be done without notarization.
A non-AG in Germany will inherently chase away almost all international investors. If you're lucky enough to find an international investor that's really interested, the most likely thing you'll be told is to either switch to AG or, preferably, re-incorporate in US/UK/Singapore and only then will your company be investable.
> You just moved the goalposts.
No, that's your misunderstanding. I mentioned a non-AG being unviable for international investors because they're the only ones worth mentioning. Local ones in Germany are mostly irrelevant for various reasons: they're either too ignorant of a specific market segment, too stingy, want too much control, only invest in later stages but not pre-seed, etc... You have to be really desperate to look for German investors, and that's true in most EU countries. The good VCs tend to be based in UK, Sweden or Estonia, with few exceptions. Angels are everywhere, but mostly outside Germany and they just won't bother with notarization for 20k EUR.