A conversation with Dante Emilio Grassi, founder of European Tech Map
There is a question that permeates how European institutions buy software: does a credible home-based alternative exist? For most procurement teams, the honest answer has been: we don't know, and don’t have the time to find out.
Not because the answer is no; there was simply no time or effort to find out easily.
That is precisely the gap that Dante Emilio Grassi set out to close when he started building the European Tech Map, now one of the largest curated directories of European-headquartered technology companies, covering more than 3,000 companies across 50 categories and 40+ countries.
In the effort of European Open Source Academy to support and shed light on important open source projects, we sat down with Grassi to talk about what he has discovered, why European founders keep their eye on the prospects of the Silicon Valley, and what digital sovereignty actually means in practice.
Open source runs through a distinct part of this story. Among more than 3,000 published listings on European Tech Map, 328 are classified as open source or source-available (322 open source and six source-available), representing 10.5% of the 3,118 published listings as of 24 August 2026. Germany accounts for roughly a third of them, followed by France. The pattern is not evenly spread across the continent.
The Hidden Geography of European Tech
One of the most striking findings from building European Tech Map, Grassi says, was how geographically distributed European tech actually is. He had expected the usual hubs such as Berlin, Stockholm, Amsterdam, London to dominate. While they do have a high concentration of tech companies, the pin-pointing of more than 3,000 companies across 40+ countries revealed a different picture.
The distribution shows the talent and the products exist across all of Europe, offering a heterogenous digital ecosystem. What is missing is "the connective issue that makes them visible to buyers outside their home market."
The lack of connectivity poses an important structural problem Europe has to prioritise. A recent survey cited by Forrester found that while 84% of IT decision-makers consider digital sovereignty a critical factor in vendor selection, only a minority feel confident their current stack actually complies with regional requirements. The gap between strategic intent and operational reality remains wide.
How Much of the Map represents Open Source?
Open source is a distinct layer inside European Tech Map rather than the whole of it. Of more than 3,000 published listings, over 320 are classified as open source or source-available, and they cluster hard: Germany accounts for roughly a third of them on its own, with France the clear second. The pattern is not evenly spread across the continent, which is itself the interesting finding.
| Country | Listings |
|---|---|
| Germany | 112 |
| France | 60 |
| Netherlands | 26 |
| United Kingdom | 26 |
| Switzerland | 13 |
| Sweden | 13 |
| Italy | 11 |
| Spain | 10 |
| Austria | 9 |
| Poland | 6 |
| Finland | 6 |
| Estonia | 5 |
Open source and source-available listings by headquarters country
France alone supplies a telling sample. European Tech Map's own curated collection of French open source companies includes Strapi, a Paris-built headless CMS; Matomo, the Lyon-based open source alternative to Google Analytics; PrestaShop, an open source e-commerce platform; Mautic, an open source alternative to HubSpot; and PeerTube, Framasoft's federated, ad-free alternative to YouTube.
Further down the list sit CryptPad (zero-knowledge collaborative docs), BlueMind and SOGo (open source Exchange/Microsoft 365 replacements), Vates' XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra (an open source VMware alternative), and Joplin (an open source, end-to-end encrypted Evernote alternative). Germany's Nextcloud, an open source replacement for Google Drive and Microsoft 365 used widely across European public administrations, follows the same pattern outside France.
Several of these run on an open-core model, a fully open source product with a paid, hosted layer on top: it is what lets small European teams sustain full-time open source development without giving up on commercial viability. That mix of community-auditable code and sustainable business model is arguably closer to what “digital sovereignty” should mean in practice than data residency alone.
Why Founders Are Still Flying West
If European alternatives are competitive, why do so many European founders still orient toward Silicon Valley? Grassi shares the main reasoning has to come down to the distribution opportunities.
"Silicon Valley is not just a location. It is a distribution machine. If you build a SaaS product and list it on Product Hunt, get covered by TechCrunch, and raise from a Sand Hill Road VC, you immediately access a global go-to-market engine that no European equivalent can match today."
European founders, he says, are not being irrational. They are simply responding to where the infrastructure exists.
Changing this, in his view, requires building the same kind of infrastructure on the European side, not through subsidies or protectionist policy, but through practical discovery tools. "The more visible European solutions become, the more rational it becomes to choose them. Visibility creates legitimacy. Legitimacy creates demand. Demand creates investment. The cycle has to start somewhere, and it starts with making the ecosystem visible."
This logic is slowly beginning to pervade the policy considerations in Europe. According to a recent TechCrunch report, Mistral AI saw its revenues surge as a credible European alternative to OpenAI — a direct consequence of growing visibility, not just technical merit. In 2026, not being American is increasingly a selling point.
What Sovereignty Actually Means
The political discourse around digital sovereignty and what it would mean for Europe has become extensive. For Grassi, the definition comes down to choice: "Digital sovereignty means having the option to choose."
It does not mean being required to buy European. It means that when a CTO or procurement lead reaches for a tool, there is a credible European option on the table. "If they look at the European option and still choose the US product, that is fine. What is not fine is when they never looked because they did not know the European option existed."
Positioning European-only tech as a defensive or a political move might become a double-edged sword. As Grassi puts it: "The 'digital wall' framing is a trap. The moment you frame European tech as a defensive move, you lose the people who actually make technology decisions."
European policymakers are slowly arriving at the same conclusion. In November 2025, all 27 EU member states signed a declaration affirming their shared ambition to strengthen digital sovereignty, not as a defense, but as part of the digital strengthening - as what Estonia's Minister for Digital Affairs Liisa Pakosta described to CNBC as "a matter of national survival, not just IT policy." In the end, European institutions have to have the option to untangle themselves from the dependency on American platforms.
The International Criminal Court in The Hague offered one of the more striking illustrations of what that dependence looks like in practice. In November 2025, the ICC announced it was replacing Microsoft Office with OpenDesk, an open source collaboration suite developed by Germany's Centre for Digital Sovereignty. The decision was partly triggered by an incident in which the chief prosecutor was temporarily locked out of his own Outlook account, a vivid reminder that we can choose what to be dependent on, and by extension, the type of vulnerability to have.
Showcasing is Important, But Infrastructure is Instrumental
Now that the European Tech Map has grown, Grassi has two priorities where the platform would go next.
The first is becoming the default reference point for anyone evaluating European software, and serving as a trusted starting point for vendor searches, not simply as an exploratory resource. At over 3,000 companies across 50 categories, coverage is already there. The goal now is making the directory the most trusted and most complete tool in the market. "Right now, the conversation about European digital sovereignty is driven by anecdotes and policy rhetoric. It needs data to back it up."
The second is community. A European Tech Map Summit is planned for 9 to 11 April 2027 in Lisbon, a small, curated gathering of European tech founders, enterprise buyers and ecosystem organisations, with registration open now. "The directory is the discovery layer. The research is the intelligence layer. The summit is the relationship layer. All three reinforce each other."
The Point Is Not to Build Walls
The broader lesson from Grassi's work may be this: the problem was never that Europe lacked alternatives. It was that those alternatives were invisible to the people who needed to find them.
As Thierry Carrez of Linux Foundation Europe told KubeCon Europe 2026 in Amsterdam, digital sovereignty is best understood as "a spectrum of resilience, not a yes-or-no state." No country is fully digitally sovereign. The goal is not isolation. It is diversification.
And across Europe, there are effective strides being made towards digital sovereignty. For instance, France, Germany, and Austria are already rolling out sovereign productivity stacks. Others like the Netherlands and Denmark are piloting open source alternatives to Microsoft Office for government employees. Spending on sovereign cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) across Europe is forecast to more than triple to $23 billion by 2027, according to Gartner.
The building of digital infrastructure is essential, but increasing the visibility of European alternatives has to become part of a collective active effort. That is what European Tech Map is doing: not building a wall, but installing a window.
In the effort to increase the visibility of European solutions, particularly of open source initiatives, European Open Source Academy has centred its activities in promoting the adoption of open source solutions through its Masterclasses, Skills Hub setup, and through the publication of the European Open Source Academy Magazine.
The Point Is Not to Build Walls
The broader lesson from Grassi's work may be this: the problem was never that Europe lacked alternatives. It was that those alternatives were invisible to the people who needed to find them.
As Thierry Carrez of Linux Foundation Europe told KubeCon Europe 2026 in Amsterdam, digital sovereignty is best understood as "a spectrum of resilience, not a yes-or-no state." No country is fully digitally sovereign. The goal is not isolation. It is diversification.
And across Europe, there are effective strides being made towards digital sovereignty. For instance, France, Germany, and Austria are already rolling out sovereign productivity stacks. Others like the Netherlands and Denmark are piloting open source alternatives to Microsoft Office for government employees. Spending on sovereign cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) across Europe is forecast to more than triple to $23 billion by 2027, according to Gartner.
The building of digital infrastructure is essential, but increasing the visibility of European alternatives has to become part of a collective active effort. That is what European Tech Map is doing: not building a wall, but installing a window.
In the effort to increase the visibility of European solutions, particularly of open source initiatives, European Open Source Academy has centred its activities in promoting the adoption of open source solutions through its Masterclasses, Skills Hub setup, and through the publication of the European Open Source Academy Magazine.
Dante Emilio Grassi is the founder of European Tech Map. Based in Lund, Sweden, he builds tools that make European software visible to the people who need it. Explore the directory at europeantechmap.eu.
References
TechCrunch — What's behind Europe's efforts to ditch US software in favor of sovereign tech
CNBC — Europe bids for digital sovereignty amid Russia threats, Trump
The Register — Europe gets serious about cutting US digital umbilical cord
France 24 — Digital sovereignty: Can Europe's businesses survive without US Big Tech?
The Register — Digital sovereignty isn't just a buzzword – it's the future (KubeCon Europe 2026 / Linux Foundation Europe)
Digital Austria — Europa unterzeichnet gemeinsame Erklärung zur Europäischen Digitalen Souveränität (18 November 2025)
Gartner — Gartner Says Worldwide Sovereign Cloud IaaS Spending Will Total $80 Billion in 2026 (9 February 2026)
