At Alkemio, we uphold the principle that technology should serve society. Guided by this conviction, we built a public interest technology company that actively facilitates collaboration across sectors and organisations to address society’s most complex challenges. This same commitment also compels us to reduce our dependence on Big Tech, an imperative that continues to gain urgency and significance across Europe.
Across Europe, the public sector is increasingly seeking a reduction in its reliance on Big Tech, especially amid geopolitical instability and rapid AI development. Denmark and the Dutch parliament have already taken decisive steps in this direction. The societal harms caused by excessive dependence on Big Tech, including the exploitative nature of their business models, are well recognised. In this blog post, we share our experience as a European tech start-up striving to achieve and support the digital autonomy that this moment so clearly demands.
Digital autonomy is the ability, including for individuals and organisations, to have control over their digital affairs. It includes the freedom and agency to choose the digital tools and services we use, without undue influence, restriction, or surveillance. It is important as it impacts our ability to interact with each other, how we store and access our information, and how our data is used.
The decisions we’ve made at Alkemio, from cloud hosting to funding models, from licensing to compliance, rarely result in the fastest, most efficient, or cheapest solutions. But they are the only ones that allow us to stay true to our purpose, and represent steps forward on a long journey that we are sharing with an increasing number of European tech companies.
Learning 1: Choosing what you want, not what is easiest
Most of today’s digital infrastructure is optimised for dependency, not freedom. Using closed, US-based platforms is often the default: they’re faster, cheaper, and more familiar. But that convenience comes at the cost of control, interoperability, and self-determination.
For a European start-up with digital autonomy ambitions, this means choosing certain platforms over others, and building from the outside of the more established digital infrastructure, with limited tooling, less support, and more friction.
At Alkemio , we made a conscious decision to host on European cloud infrastructure (Scaleway), use open-source components, and avoid the dominant vendor lock-ins. That sounds principled. But it can also mean higher upfront costs, slower integrations, less polished user interfaces, and longer onboarding times.
We chose Mistral for use on the Alkemio platform, while recognising that the level of ChatGPT is higher. We believe that a European, open-source option not only aligned well with our principles but also presented the appropriate flexibility for our users’ needs.
We chose to work with less established companies, aware of the risk that they may not still exist in the years to come. As a start-up, Alkemio has lost out on some mandates due to this risk, so we know it plays an important role in procurement decisions. But without supporting the type of technology companies we want to have, those companies don’t build the client base that enables greater funding, which leads to greater product quality and continues the positive loop to becoming mainstream. It is not about the growth of one technology giant, as often seen in Silicon Valley, but rather a healthy ecosystem of players.
The easier decision to go with the big established company is not always the right decision, especially when we factor in the long-term vision of the digital future we want and decide to take steps towards achieving it.
We learned that if we wanted to be free from extractive ecosystems, we need to build parallel infrastructure and support other companies doing so. While striving to compete with the incumbents on performance, user experience, and customer support, and working with partners and users who recognise that this does not happen overnight.
Learning 2: Europe Talks a Big Game on Digital Sovereignty but Support Remains Shallow
Digital sovereignty is everywhere in European policy discourse. It’s in strategy papers, speeches, and funding calls. But on the ground, start-ups trying to build on digital autonomy principles face a different reality: fragmented regulation, slow procurement, and risk-averse institutions still defaulting to Big Tech.
Being digitally autonomous is not just a technical act; it’s a political one. And small players are left to navigate this terrain mostly alone. Alkemio has spent years trying to align with EU frameworks around open standards, digital public infrastructure , and data sovereignty. But instead of support, we often encounter contradictory incentives: funding that prioritises scale over everything else , or procurement processes that exclude newer, open-source players by default.
Other start-ups are navigating this too. Nextcloud , one of the largest open-source cloud collaboration platforms in Europe, has been actively campaigning for governments not to ignore local, sovereign options in favour of US tech. Despite their proven scale and compliance, they’re still treated as the “risky” choice.
Policy is not enough. Europe must match its rhetoric with procurement, investment, and compliance frameworks that don’t punish autonomy.
Learning 3: Enabling Autonomy Has Costs, but It Pays Off in Trust
Enabling digital autonomy comes with opportunity costs. If you’re not monetising user data or locking users into proprietary ecosystems, you must earn revenues the hard way: through winning users who value and trust the openness, governance, and long-term commitment of your product.
At Alkemio, we chose open licensing and transparent governance from the start. This wasn’t just about ethics; it was about alignment with our platform’s key value proposition. However, that model is hard to explain in a pitch deck, where investors are used to reading stories about scaling revenue from paid ads and the selling of user data. It requires building a reputation of trust, which takes time.
We’ve seen similar paths taken by projects like Decidim in Spain, a participatory democracy platform used by cities and institutions across Europe. Their open governance and ethical architecture have made them a trusted partner in civic tech, but it has taken years of persistent work, and much of it remains underfunded.
The upfront cost of doing things the right way, in code, in governance, in data, is high. But in an age of rising distrust, a focus on autonomy can be a necessary lifeboat.
Learning 4: Autonomy Does Not Mean Alone
The more we delve into achieving and enabling digital autonomy, the more we realise that autonomy doesn’t mean isolation. True digital autonomy requires deep interdependence with aligned partners, open ecosystems, and shared values.
Too often, European start-ups building ethical or sovereign alternatives are working in silos. Each one reinventing governance, security, compliance, and user education without shared infrastructure or standards. This is a waste of effort, leaving the whole ecosystem fragile.
We don’t need to build everything ourselves. But we do need infrastructure we can trust, and partners who share our long-term vision. We’re inspired by collaborative efforts like the PublicSpaces in the Netherlands, which bring together values-aligned players to coordinate on shared challenges. Autonomy doesn’t mean going solo. It means co-creating systems that are resilient because they’re shared.
Learning 5: Governance is too often an afterthought, and that must change
In the push toward digital autonomy, the focus is often on the technical functionality and capabilities. Yet governance defines who holds power – both now and in the future. It impacts who makes decisions, who benefits from technology and how accountability is enforced. When treated as an afterthought, it carries the risk that we end up back where we are now.
Governance cannot be retrofitted. It must be embedded from the outset - co-created, transparent, and aligned with the public interest. Without it, digital autonomy risks becoming a hollow ideal, rather than a meaningful shift in control and agency.
Building real autonomy starts with clear choices
To be digitally autonomous, deliberate decisions on the stack are necessary from the start. At Alkemio, we shifted from U.S.-based clouds and proprietary tools to European-hosted infrastructure and fully open-source components. This slowed us down initially, but it builds long-term control, trust, and compliance. European start-ups should perform an audit of dependencies - hosting, operations, analytics, etc., and make value-aligned alternatives the default. It’s not easy, but it’s a foundational decision that shapes everything downstream.
Governance, openness, and interoperability matter as much as code
Autonomy isn’t just a feature. We’ve used open-source licensing and transparent documentation to align our platform with public benefit, not extraction. We also built for interoperability, using open standards. European start-ups following this model should embed governance and open standards into their roadmaps from day one, so that autonomy becomes practical, not aspirational.
A call for a digitally autonomous European ecosystem
Building a digitally autonomous start-up in Europe today is like climbing uphill, while Big Tech sits at the top of the hill and uses its huge lobbying and advertising budgets to stay there. We don’t say this to complain. We chose this path. But we also see what’s broken and what’s needed next.
If Europe is serious about digital autonomy, its policies must go beyond strategy papers and into procurement contracts. Right now, too many innovative European tech companies are excluded from public tenders due to outdated procurement criteria that favour scale, familiarity, and incumbents. Policymakers need to create procurement guidelines that reward interoperability, open source and transparency, not just legacy compliance checklists. Governments must rethink what “value for money” means in the long term, because continued reliance on Big Tech undermines our ability to control critical infrastructure and protect democratic institutions.
At the same time, funders, public, philanthropic, and private capital investors should aim to strengthen the financial backbone of Europe’s tech ecosystem. Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund is a strong start, offering long-term support for foundational open-source projects. There are proposals for a similar effort in the Netherlands. These efforts must be scale d across the EU, with dedicated funding streams for technologies that serve the public interest and reduce structural dependencies.
Because this isn’t about Alkemio. It’s about a growing group of builders, thinkers, and institutions trying to reclaim agency over the tools we use to work, learn, govern, and collaborate. Digital autonomy is not a buzzword. It is a foundation for a fairer future.
