For years, European governments have spoken about digital sovereignty as a strategic necessity, investing heavily in sovereign cloud services, artificial intelligence and secure communications. Yet the most personal and widely used piece of technology, the smartphone, has remained largely outside that effort, dominated by Android and iOS, two operating systems that are closed, foreign controlled and difficult to audit.
Soverli, a Zurich based cybersecurity startup spun out of ETH Zurich, argues that it has found a way to close that gap. The company announced it has raised $2.6 million in pre seed funding to commercialize what it describes as a sovereign operating system layer that can run alongside Android or iOS on any commercial smartphone, without requiring hardware changes.
The claim is ambitious. Smartphones are deeply integrated systems, and previous attempts to offer secure or sovereign alternatives have typically forced users to choose between security and usability. Hardened phones often restrict apps, remove features or require cumbersome switching between operating systems, limiting their appeal beyond niche users.
Soverli’s pitch is that it eliminates those tradeoffs. Developed over more than four years of research at ETH Zurich, the company’s patent pending approach allows multiple operating systems to run simultaneously in isolation on a single device. Users keep their standard Android experience while accessing a separate, fully auditable environment for sensitive tasks, switching between the two almost instantly.
“Availability is mission-critical, yet organizations still rely on operating systems they cannot control or audit,” said Ivan Puddu, co founder and chief executive 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.”
As a technical demonstration, the company showed the encrypted messaging app Signal running inside its isolated environment. By sharply reducing the attack surface and separating the app entirely from Android, Soverli says communications remain confidential even if the primary operating system is compromised by spyware or malicious software updates.
The broader context gives the company’s ambitions resonance. Europe’s push for digital sovereignty has accelerated amid concerns about geopolitical dependence, supply chain risk and the fragility of complex software systems. Large scale outages triggered by flawed updates in recent years have underscored how much trust is placed in operating systems that most users and institutions cannot inspect or control.
Still, major questions remain. Android and iOS are not just operating systems but ecosystems, tightly bound to app stores, developer tools and hardware optimization. Even if Soverli’s architecture works as advertised, widespread adoption would require cooperation from smartphone manufacturers, mobile carriers and enterprise IT departments, all of which move slowly and cautiously.
There is also the question of scale. The company’s first pilots focus on mission critical communication for emergency services and critical infrastructure, a market where reliability can outweigh convenience. Whether the same approach can succeed with consumers, or even across large enterprises with diverse device fleets, is far from certain.
“People deserve phones they can actually trust, and OEMs must deliver it,” said Antonia Albert, an investor at Founderful. “Soverli’s Swiss-made sovereign layer is the kind of breakthrough that can rewrite the rules of mobile security.”
Investor enthusiasm aside, the path forward will likely test the company’s ability to navigate platform politics as much as technical complexity. Google and Apple tightly control their software environments, and neither has shown much appetite for ceding influence over how smartphones operate.
With its new funding, Soverli plans to expand its engineering team, support more smartphone models and deepen integrations with mobile device management systems. Whether that will be enough to turn a promising academic breakthrough into a widely adopted standard remains an open question.
If Soverli succeeds, it could reshape how governments and institutions think about trust on mobile devices. If it fails, it will join a long list of efforts that underestimated just how entrenched Android and iOS have become.