Every time I see an idea like this (or a politician talking about tech 'sovereignty') I feel sad for the 20-year-old me who really believed in the declaration of the independence of cyberspace.
> 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.
This reads as very naive now. As soon as a critical mass of people got online, and they wanted their governments to apply laws and regulations there, it was going to happen.
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!
> I feel sad for the 20-year-old me who really believed in the declaration of the independence of cyberspace.
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.
Its most horrifying if you look at what it usually burns down and fizzles out to. Governments in the middle east- one dominant family, extracting, the rest suffering in silence boxed away in silos, with no chance to move and create ever again - well except for unrest and fundamentalist movements.
Such an idea never made any real sense, and never will until you can figure out how to move IT infrastructure into a separate dimension where governments have no authority. Those servers have to sit somewhere.
I don’t understand why Mistral gets so little recognition. They consistently have a top model on benchmarks such as LiveBench and their models are open source. Hugging Face is French, Black Forrest Labs (Stable Diffusion) is German, Weaviate is Dutch, Hetzner for IaasS. There’s AI here. Maybe hardware production is the bigger problem?
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.
Mistral Vibe is cheap for what you get - I haven't run into limits yet, and you can use the same API key for the CLI for their API to run Codestral, Mistral large, etc. Le Chat is great as well, especially research mode. Afaik their models are running on Cerebras so you are never waiting for a response.
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.
Do they? That's surprising. I saw them come up here twice for their OCR model, I tried using it on a 200 PDF that was just printed text without embedded OCR and it failed miserably - got less than tesseract and I ended up with a $5 bill.
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 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
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
The European digital scene isn't a pipeline problem; it's an institutional 'safe harbor' problem. We have world-class publicly funded research and education, and the talent, just look at the startup floor at Vivatech or WebSummit, but European Private Equity and late-stage capital remain structurally locked into 'Old Economy' models.
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.
Is Spotify US based? They did get listed on the NY Exchange but I think they are still headquartered in Sweden. Not that one example says much but if true, at least one tech giant managed to not succumb to American capital.
EU tech alternative is FLOSS, not copy the model someone else did earlier and better. As an EU Citizen I reject the initiatives of the Commission, which moreover, is not elected but appointed through a mechanism where the will of the people never plays a part, whose goals are the sinicization of the EU and its destruction for partisan interests against ours.
To have a sovereign IT sector, we must ENFORCE FLOSS and open hardware in no uncertain terms, rather than copying Big Tech.
There are no european alternatives. These are all european companies but they dont benefit the whole union.
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.
Stop being racist. Immigrants are given the lowest level type of jobs which nobody wants to do anymore. Others are then prospering to better jobs. That's how you keep the economy growing.
But I can move freely to Germany and get employed there as an EU citizen. Or, my competitors in the job market do, leaving more jobs for men And taxes pain in Germany also goes to the common EU budget. So the success of a German company also benefits me in another EU country.
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 title is wrong as they only included EU/EEA/EFTA/UK companies, at least according to their faq page. Which would exclude multiple balkan countries and some others.
They need to fix the addresses. In Stockholm, all of the companies are placed in the old town. At Hopsworks, we are in Sodermalm (hipster) - we are not old school money.
not all that useful. for a more useful alternative I'd prefer to see companies up from a certain size (I've noticed some small startups on the map) and if the're (not) using aws/azure/gcp/chinaCloud (whatever the names are).
I briefly went thought the list - a lot of hosted systems (probably kubernetes underneath etc). This is not unique or anything.
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
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.
The fact is that Europe is a lot of things. You have the British class system (not that hidden), you have French and German bureaucracy, but you also have the unique combination of egalitarianism and mercantilism in Scandinavia and the Netherlands, and the zeal of Polish progressivism, shared by a number of their former east block neighbors.
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 it would require there to be a European chip demand. Today that demand is almost entirely for cars, so we only get mediocre car infotainment chips (+ a few other similar niches). There was more hope 20 years ago, when there were widely successful European mobile phone makers.
Peak EU mindset thinking all we need is a nifty little map application to find alternatives.
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.
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.
“Tech alternatives” yet a good portion of the companies I randomly clicked on are software services/outsourcing, especially on the eastern side.
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.
Feels like you're addressing two different topics in one comment.
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...
> 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.
>Show me a European iPhone, European Microsoft, European Nvidia, 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.
Realistically, what you're asking for won't happen unless there's a strong push for Federalisation.
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.
Good. You can keep most of those, we don't want them.
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.
Over the last 20 years, Europe has become irrelevant.
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.
Why does Europe need to dump hundreds of billions of dollars into developing a chatbot that will never be able to pay off its debts? Mistral seems like a much more practical and sustainable approach to LLM development than centering the entire economy around a pyramid scheme predicated on selling the belief that AGI is always three months away.
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.
We have been overly reliant on non-European partners we could trust and rely on. That is now gone. So right now is a good opportunity for Europe to focus inward. Imagine having all the social benefits AND tech. We also need to make sure keep malignant actors like the USA & Russia at bay.
One can dream.
I am old enough to remember variations of this conversation from 20 years ago. If you scratch, you always find ideology underneath: an antipathy for regulation that puts people before money and for sharing the cost of social safety nets. I like living in Europe. It's not perfect (what is), but it's pretty good. Living my life well vs. worrying about my country not buying enough GPUs to keep the markets excited? Choices, choices...
That assumes LLMs are relevant and will be around a year from now. Let’s not forget NFTs.
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…
Using a European solution just because it’s European sounds wrong to me.
Sounds like we’ve done this kind of nationalism in the past and failed. There are other reasons why Europe isn’t attractive for bringing these kinds of technologies to life, and investor money is only a small part of it. Especially in a company’s early days.
Building a market reserved for mediocre tech solutions sounds like the wrong way to make Europe more independent.
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.
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.
> Using a European solution just because it’s European sounds wrong to me.
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?
I think the depths of the answers here, particularly with China, are far beyond the scope of technical discussion and to be honest likely beyond the scope of European-specific tech needs. Just because the US did one thing a certain way, and China did it another way; doesn't mean Europe must follow either of those to be successful.
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.
phaser|11 days ago
> 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
Nursie|11 days ago
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!
andsoitis|11 days ago
Cyberspace depends on physical reality and everything that comes from that. Resource constraints, economics, politics, arms races, warfare, etc.
11mariom|11 days ago
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.
21asdffdsa12|11 days ago
wlecometo|11 days ago
unknown|10 days ago
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shiroiuma|11 days ago
wald3n|11 days ago
ruicraveiro|11 days ago
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.
slopinthebag|11 days ago
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.
dwedge|11 days ago
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
Tinkeringz|11 days ago
https://livebench.ai/
notrealyme123|11 days ago
g-mork|11 days ago
culi|11 days ago
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
gib444|11 days ago
(yes, I see the .eu domain but that's minor)
buovjaga|11 days ago
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
breppp|11 days ago
karel-3d|11 days ago
Manheim|11 days ago
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.
brabel|11 days ago
gib444|11 days ago
kkfx|11 days ago
To have a sovereign IT sector, we must ENFORCE FLOSS and open hardware in no uncertain terms, rather than copying Big Tech.
mathverse|11 days ago
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.
menaerus|11 days ago
jakobnissen|11 days ago
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.
RobotToaster|11 days ago
jamesblonde|11 days ago
mikae1|11 days ago
unknown|11 days ago
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leccy_wizard|11 days ago
XCSme|7 days ago
zabzonk|11 days ago
Keyframe|11 days ago
resonious|11 days ago
galkk|11 days ago
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.
drawfloat|11 days ago
It’s ludicrous to pretend important ideas only come from the US and China.
simonask|11 days ago
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.
m00dy|11 days ago
joshuaisaact|11 days ago
dadoum|11 days ago
NekkoDroid|11 days ago
https://www.esmc.eu/en/index.html
waihtis|11 days ago
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.
jimnotgym|11 days ago
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.
dantegrassi|11 days ago
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
redrove|11 days ago
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.
karambahh|11 days ago
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...
joshuaisaact|11 days ago
It was a travesty that the UK government let it be sold, admittedly.
cyberax|11 days ago
> 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.
stackghost|11 days ago
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.
raincole|11 days ago
puchatek|11 days ago
coredev_|11 days ago
As for leaders, von der Leyen might not be the best but still lightyears better than the orange pedo in the wh.
budududuroiu|11 days ago
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.
DeathArrow|11 days ago
Heliosmaster|11 days ago
gib444|11 days ago
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.
ph4rsikal|11 days ago
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.
anonymous908213|11 days ago
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.
michelb|11 days ago
telmo|11 days ago
isodev|11 days ago
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…
perbu|11 days ago
But the lack of risk capital and investor brainpower has been a huge problem.
unknown|11 days ago
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shaky-carrousel|11 days ago
flobanana|11 days ago
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.
barrell|11 days ago
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.
jimnotgym|11 days ago
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?
culi|11 days ago
And the whole point here is a more diverse alternative to the extreme dependency on the US tech companies
ArekDymalski|11 days ago
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.
blackcatsec|11 days ago
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.
vanviegen|11 days ago
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.
breppp|11 days ago
China is an example, countries that had become technology independent through sanctions is another
raincole|11 days ago
Nationalism, but armed with actual law enforcement and economical support instead of good intentions and lip service.
unknown|11 days ago
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SkiFire13|11 days ago
And what are these other reasons?
redrove|11 days ago
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.