Zurich-based
cybersecurity company Soverli has raised $2.6 million in pre-seed funding to
develop a sovereign smartphone architecture designed to operate alongside
Android and iOS for OEMs, enterprises, governments, and consumers. The round
was led by Founderful, with participation from the ETH Zurich Foundation,
Venture Kick, and cybersecurity industry figures.
Based on
more than four years of research at ETH Zurich, Soverli’s patent-pending
approach is intended to run multiple operating systems simultaneously on a
single device while keeping them isolated. The company says this enables a
customizable and auditable sovereign OS to operate in parallel with Android on
standard smartphones, with users able to switch between environments quickly.
As a
demonstration, Soverli showed Signal running inside its sovereign OS and said
the setup isolates the app from Android and reduces the attack surface, with
the goal of keeping messages confidential even if Android is compromised. The
company adds that the approach requires no hardware modifications and is
intended to work on current commercial smartphones without limiting typical
use.
Soverli
positions the product within broader efforts, particularly in Europe, to
strengthen digital sovereignty and operational continuity, arguing that
smartphones remain a gap because secure communications and device management
depend on the underlying OS. Early prototypes developed at ETH Zurich drew
interest from public-sector and enterprise stakeholders as well as European
manufacturers and integrators, contributing to the team spinning out as an
independent company.
The
initial focus is mission-critical communications, with public-sector pilots
underway in emergency response and critical infrastructure contexts. The
company says an isolated environment can continue operating on a separate
software stack if the primary OS is disrupted, helping keep communications and
core workflows running. The same approach is also being evaluated for secure
communications and enterprise bring-your-own-device use cases.
With the new funding,
Soverli plans to expand its engineering team, support more smartphone models,
strengthen integrations with mobile device management systems, and scale
partnerships with OEMs.