Digital sovereignty is rapidly becoming one of Europe’s defining geopolitical priorities, driving billions in investment across sovereign cloud, AI, national networks, and next-generation sovereign communication. Despite the scale of these efforts, smartphones remain the last unclaimed frontier of digital sovereignty. These devices — now central to nearly everyone’s daily life and relied upon by governments, emergency services, and critical industries — are still un-auditable Android and iOS black boxes. This not only undermines sovereignty but creates systemic fragility: a single faulty update (as seen in the CrowdStrike global outage) or hidden kill switch can take hundreds of millions of devices offline, raising serious questions about the suitability of these devices for mission-critical infrastructure. Even for individuals seeking more control, the only option today is to abandon everyday convenience to run an alternative operating system — a trade-off few can realistically make. 

Soverli, a cybersecurity company, has raised $2.6 million in pre-seed funding to introduce a sovereign smartphone architecture that, crucially, works alongside Android and iOS. This makes true mobile sovereignty accessible to every OEM, enterprise, government, and consumer. The pre-seed round was led by Founderful, with participation from the ETH Zurich Foundation, Venture Kick, and leading figures in cybersecurity, adding strong validation from experts in high-assurance systems and trusted computing. 

Developed over more than four years of research at ETH Zurich, Soverli’s patent-pending methodology enables multiple operating systems (OS) to run in isolation – simultaneously – on a single device. This effectively turns every commercial phone into sovereign infrastructure. For the first time, a fully sovereign, customizable, and auditable OS can run in parallel to Android — on any smartphone, with zero trade-offs: users keep the full Android experience on one OS and can switch to the sovereign OS in milliseconds at the press of a button.

As a showcase of what this can enable, Soverli demonstrated Signal running inside its bespoke sovereign OS: by reducing the attack surface by 500× and isolating the app from Android entirely, Signal’s messages remain confidential even if Android is malicious or compromised with spyware. And because Soverli requires no hardware modifications, this level of protection works on today’s commercial smartphones without impacting what people can do with them.

Soverli’s relevance has grown as Europe and other regions race to strengthen digital sovereignty and ensure business continuity for governments, mission-critical personnel, and essential industries. Today’s secure-phone solutions force a tradeoff between security and usability as they remove features, restrict apps, or require users to reboot between operating systems. Soverli eliminates that compromise, delivering sovereign-grade security without sacrificing usability.