Europe’s push for digital sovereignty has transformed clouds, networks, and data infrastructure into strategic priorities. Yet the most personal and widely used piece of technology, the smartphone, has remained untouched. Governments, emergency services, enterprises, and citizens all depend on devices controlled by external operating systems that cannot be fully audited or influenced. That gap has now become impossible to ignore.
ETH Zurich spin-off Soverli is stepping into that space with a new approach to mobile security and independence, backed by a $2.6 million pre-seed round led by Founderful, with support from the ETH Zurich Foundation, Venture Kick, and seasoned cybersecurity experts.
With fresh funding, Soverli plans to expand its engineering team, support more smartphone families, deepen integrations with device management systems, and work closely with OEMs. Its long-term ambition is clear: to establish a new standard for how software is layered on smartphones, closing the final gap in digital sovereignty without asking users to give anything up.
Breaking the security–usability trade-off
Smartphones today are built around a single operating system that controls the entire device. Improving security in this model usually means cutting features, limiting apps, or asking users to place deep trust in the OS vendor’s access to their data. For governments, public institutions, journalists, and critical industries, this creates an uncomfortable compromise between usability and sovereignty. High-end mobile security exists, but it is typically reserved for extreme risk scenarios because the everyday trade-offs are too severe for most people.
Soverli removes that compromise by changing how security is applied. Instead of weakening the whole phone, it introduces a dedicated, highly hardened environment that runs alongside the normal smartphone experience. This secure space can be locked down far more aggressively because it supports only a narrow set of sensitive functions, while the rest of the device remains fully functional. The result is dramatically stronger privacy and protection, previously available only to high-risk individuals, without degrading day-to-day usability for everyone else.
Why smartphones remain a strategic weak point
Modern smartphones sit at the heart of mission-critical operations, from emergency response to government communications. Yet they remain closed systems, vulnerable to hidden dependencies, forced updates, or large-scale failures. The global outage triggered by a single faulty software update last year highlighted how fragile this setup can be.
Until now, gaining control meant sacrificing usability. Alternative operating systems strip away everyday apps and features, making them unrealistic for most users. Secure phones solve some risks but introduce others by locking devices down or forcing disruptive reboots between systems. For institutions and individuals alike, the choice has been between convenience and control.
Soverli’s premise is that this trade-off is unnecessary.
From ETH Zurich research to a commercial breakthrough
As per Ivan Puddu, CEO and co-founder at Soverli, said: “The company grew out of a four-year research project at ETH Zurich focused on unlocking new capabilities on smartphones while achieving a higher level of security than is possible on today’s platforms. The research gave us a strong technical foundation proving the viability of the approach, but we quickly realised that pushing it further required a level of access and integration that we could only achieve by commercialising the technology: this is because it’s not like a simple app that can be installed integration into different phones requires modifying the system software that is controlled by the phone manufacturer (OEMs).”
“However, OEMs are usually reluctant to give this sort of access. Since we have a strong conviction that this approach has the potential to improve people’s lives, as soon as we realised that commercialising the technology was the only way to put it in the hands of people, we decided to take the challenge and incorporate the company,” he added.
He went on to state that “As we began sharing the concept with potential end-users, especially in government and the public sector, the interest was immediate. They saw in our work a way to strengthen digital sovereignty while still, for the first time, providing modern functionality and convenience to their users. To meet that demand, we engaged with OEMs, who recognised the commercial potential and provided the technical access needed to take the technology further. That momentum convinced us to spin the project out, build a company around it, and bring this solution to market.”
Secure messaging in total isolation
As a proof point, Soverli demonstrated Signal running entirely inside its isolated environment. Messages remain confidential even if the main operating system is compromised by spyware at the most advanced level. Sensitive operations stay protected, while the rest of the phone works as usual.
This design makes sovereign-grade security practical for the first time on everyday devices.
From pilots to public infrastructure
Early prototypes quickly attracted attention from governments, public-sector bodies, and enterprises searching for operational safety without forcing users onto restrictive hardware. European smartphone manufacturers and system integrators also recognised the strategic implications, accelerating Soverli’s move from research project to independent company.
The first deployments focus on mission-critical communication. Public-sector pilots are already underway with organisations responsible for emergency response and critical infrastructure. If the main operating system fails due to misconfiguration or attack, Soverli’s isolated environment continues running independently, keeping communication and workflows alive for police, firefighters, EMTs, and other first responders.
The same architecture offers protection for journalists, human rights workers, and enterprises adopting bring-your-own-device models, allowing secure workspaces alongside private use without invasive controls.
What are the future plans?
He continued stating, “One of the highlights of our current product offering is that we enable the most secure way to do secure messaging on a phone: We are able to reduce by 500x the amount of code that needs to be trusted and bug-free to execute a messaging application (like Signal or Threema). This is possible because we run these apps in full isolation from the main operating system (Android), in a part of the phone that is bespoke to run these applications.
In the future we want to also support two Android operating systems running side-by-side. With the advantage that one can run Google Mobile Services (play store, etc), and the other can be completely “de-Googlified” or completely open sourced to make it fully auditable. Giving people the choice for the first time to choose which data they want to keep in a de-googled OS and which services they still want to use – so if a user does not want a particular picture to be used to train AI, they can keep it on the separate part of the phone, but at the same time enjoy the AI assistant on the OS controlled by Google.
Another functionality that we can support is to have more than two “operating systems” running side-by-side. Say 3 of them, where two are two different Android versions like in point 1. Above, and the third is a dedicated OS for the messaging application.
We generally want to create a more open ecosystem so that independent developers can experiment with and deploy separate operating systems on smartphones. Ideally create a community of developers that can play with this concept and develop new functionalities and enable new use cases with it.”
“Availability is mission-critical, yet organisations still rely on operating systems they cannot control or audit,” said Ivan Puddu, co-founder and CEO of Soverli. “We built a fully-auditable smartphone sovereign layer that stays operational even when Android is compromised. It’s a paradigm shift: instead of hoping the OS never breaks, Soverli guarantees continuity if it does, without forcing users to give up the modern smartphone experience they expect.”
“People deserve phones they can actually trust, and OEMs must deliver it,” said Antonia Albert, Investor at Founderful. “Soverli’s Swiss-made sovereign layer is the kind of breakthrough that can rewrite the rules of mobile security.”
