Who We Are
Concern about the capture of Europe’s digital infrastructure and the slow demise of our digital capabilities has been raised by multiple voices in the past two years – as it became increasingly clear to many of us that Europe’s reliance on digital regulation was not going to protect our assets and talents from extinction and migration.
The EuroStack Industry Initiative is a distinct voice within the EuroStack movement, which pursues a vision of EuroStack as an industrial strategy project led by the European tech industry. It is not a lobby organization, and it is constituting as a not-for-profit Foundation.
Origins of the EuroStack movement
The EuroStack movement originated from a multiparty conference organized by Cristina Caffarra, Francesca Bria, Meredith Whittaker, Alexandra Geese and Kai Zenner at the European Parliament on 24 September 2024: Towards European Digital Independence: Building the EuroStack.[1]
The event was intended to put the mission of European tech resurgence (from its retreat into a position of total dependence on non-European tech) on the map for the next Commission mandate (2025-29). Thibaut Kleiner from DG Connect was a Speaker at the event, which hosted multiple voices from industry, tech experts, European institutions, think tanks, associations, civil society, academics and policymaking (including protagonists of India Stack and the Brazilian tech sovereignty movement). [2]
Aftermath of the EuroStack founding event in September 2024
Following the September 2024 event, multiple individuals and groups pursued the idea in different forms. Cristina Caffarra assembled a group of tech industry participants to produce first a pitch document with the key ideas, EuroStack: European Strategic Sovereign Digital Infrastructures in January 2025[3], and then the White Paper Deploying the EuroStack: What’s Needed Now [4] in April 2025 [5].
Several events have been hosted since September 2024 by multiple bodies on and around EuroStack, making it the most successful policy initiative to have emerged from Brussels in the last few years. The term appeared on the programme of the German government Coalition in May 2025, it was discussed during the Polish European Presidency in Gdansk, multiple times in Paris, at the start of the Danish Presidency, and in multiple events sponsored by the European Commission (DIGIT Agora Summit Ref), and a large number of associations, foundations and industry groups.
The EuroStack Industry Initiative
The EuroStack Industry Initiative assembles a group of European tech CEOs and executives operating businesses across the “stack” (from cloud, to software, to connectivity, to AI) around the view that Europe needs to reverse the steep decline which turned it into a “digital colony” of mainly US tech giants, and recover a role as supplier of services to European customers. Europe needs to create more resilience, less dependency, more security, greater alternatives and less exposure to suppliers responding to non-European rules. This is particularly important in a developing geopolitical reality which is exposing European weakness and inability to respond to the demands of the new US administration.
The Industry Initiative conceives the required effort as one where industry needs to lead the way. Not a path charted by academics, think tanks and civil society, nor a “top down” plan from the bureaucracy with allocation of European taxpayer funds in ways that do not directly respond to the actual concrete needs of customers and do not involve commercial-grade products (but research and prototypes).[6] The Initiative issued a Letter to the European Commission President and EVPs Henna Virkkunen and Stephane Sejourne’, which attracted signatures from nearly 300 tech businesses across Europe. [7] Multiple interviews and press articles across Europe have amplified the idea.[8]
The pillars of the Initiative (as described in the White Paper) are Buy European, Sell European, and Fund European. Buy European focuses on the need for public procurement in the first instance to proactively shift a portion of its demand towards European suppliers, to create a virtuous cycle in which European products are seen as credible alternatives to US technology. Sell European focuses on the need for industry to proactively create bundles of products that respond to customers’ needs, and customers want to buy. Fund European deals with the question of funding European initiatives – a capital allocation problem for Europe. For clarity, the Initiative does not advocate for “decoupling” Europe from US tech, nor for “complete independence” as US tech lobbyists are alleging. This is not the plan. The intention remains to power up European industrial capacity in a critical sector for our future growth (given the role digitization plays in all sectors). Not to the exclusion of US tech, but alongside to provide autonomous alternatives and more – not less – competition.
Status
Key actors in the EuroStack Industry Initiative together with Cristina Caffarra are Yann Lechelle (CEO probabl.ai), Andy Yen (CEO Proton), Frank Karlischek (CEO NextCloud), Wolfgang Oels (CEO Ecosia), Stefane Fermigier (CEO APELL), Felix Styma (iconomy) Clark Parsons (CEO IEF and Startup Association), Mattias Astrom (Evroc), and many more… The Initiative is constituting into a non-profit foundation which will pursue the three pillars described above. It is not a lobby association, and none of its supporters and voices are paid for their advocacy work.
The group believes that the EuroStack term is a public good which should not be appropriated by any individual nor used for commercial exploitation by any one particular party.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RR2X_rZ_zbo&t=7s
[2] Toward European Digital Independence.
[3] https://eurostack.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/eurostack_pitch_10-january-2025.pdf, drafted by Cristina Caffarra with contributions from invited speakers at the September event (Francesco Bonfiglio, Robin Berjon, Sebastiano Toffaletti, and Vittorio Bertola).
[4] https://eurostack.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/eurostack-white-paper-final-19-05-25-3.pdf
[5] The paper was primarily drafted by Cristina Caffarra, Stefane Fermigier, Antonio Gambardella, Agata Hidalgo, Yann Lechelle, Clark Parsons, Felix Styma, Andy Yen, with multiple contributions and feedback from Jean Baptiste Piacentino, Vittorio Bertola, Paul-Henri Charrier, Johan Christenson, Raphael Daniel, Ester Davanzo, Alain Garnier, Luc Greefs, Bert Hubert, Frank Karlischek, Jerome Lecat, Daniel Melin, Wolfgang Oels, Sonja Schweicker, Achim Weiss, Kai Zenner, and several more.
[6] See among others Cristina Caffarra, https://www.techpolicy.press/europe-needs-to-do-more-than-scratch-at-the-ramparts-of-big-techs-castle/ , https://escapeforward.substack.com/p/european-digital-sovereignty-is-an-industrial-project-everyone-else-get-out-of-the-way, and https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/eurostack-iniriative-aims-to-boost-european-digital-sovereignty-by-cristina-caffarra-2025-03
[7] See https://eurostack.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/eurostack-letter-with-logos-25-7-25.pdf