Sovereignty 2030: Nextcloud invests over €250 million in digital sovereignty

European software company Nextcloud presents its investment program „Sovereignty 2030“ to make the high-performance, sovereign open-source platform more widely available for organizations. The European company plans to invest more than 250 million Euros in digital sovereignty until 2030. The digital collaboration platform provider will invest in research and development, product innovations and partner enablement, public education and community projects to drive digital sovereignty in Europe.

„Europe can’t wait. As political decision making takes time, it is the local private sector that has to push our economic independence in a bottom-up approach. This is why we decided to take the lead. While infrastructure is important, we believe that the investment in brain power, people and education will be the decisive factor when it comes to sovereignty and digital independence,“ said Frank Karlitschek, CEO and founder, Nextcloud.

The investment program „Sovereignty 2030“ comprises the following focus areas:

1. People and brain power: Over the next five years, Nextcloud aims to expand its global workforce 7-fold to expand its product and set a new standard in collaboration technology. The firm will introduce key security and compliance innovations, invest in further AI research programs, expand scalability and performance of the product as well as developing new features that will further improve the productivity of teams collaborating in digital workplace environments.
2. Sovereign ecosystem: Nextcloud seeks to expand its global partner ecosystem and strengthen existing partnerships in order to create an industry-wide movement that allows individuals, private companies, and the public sector an easy setup and effortless, secure access to sovereign IT solutions. In October, Nextcloud already announced to be a founding member of the EuroStack Foundation with the goal to move from talking about digital sovereignty to taking action.
3. Educate and inform: Nextcloud will further expand its collaboration with partners and civil society organizations to educate and inform the public about privacy, security and digital sovereignty. Moreover, it will augment its leading role in the open source community, advocating and educating about the benefits of transparency, open standards and open code.
4. Empower the community: Nextcloud aims to grow and support the wider open source community, providing resources from coaching, training, and documentation to travel support, bringing together contributors from around the world to create and innovate on concepts of digital sovereignty, decentralization, and federation.

With Nextcloud, users can edit and share documents, chat and hold video conferences, and manage emails, contacts and calendars via easy web and mobile apps. Thousands of government agencies, companies, universities, research institutions and schools across Europe and beyond use Nextcloud, adding to the millions of individual users globally.

„Since the beginning of the year, interest in Nextcloud has tripled. Potential customers are also stating very clearly that they see dependency on big tech as a risk,“ said Frank Karlitschek. „We demonstrate that sovereign alternatives to big tech are not only possible, but already available.“

Founded in 2016, the open source company has developed its software from an enterprise file sync and share solution to a comprehensive collaboration platform, including chat, videoconferencing, office, groupware (mail, calendar, contacts), process automation engine and an AI Assistant. The open-source software has a modular design and can be extended with hundreds of apps. Nextcloud software runs on premises in a private cloud or with a trusted provider.

„We have constantly expanded our team and increased our spending in research and development to tens of millions per year,” said Frank Karlitschek.

Nextcloud aims to achieve this growth without venture capital or other external funding. Historically the company has grown its bookings 50-70% percent year over year. The company is profitable and headquartered in Germany.

About Nextcloud
Nextcloud is the world’s most popular privacy-focused collaboration platform. It is used by tens of thousands of private and public organizations and tens of millions of private individuals to stay in control of their sensitive data and ensure privacy compliance.

With Nextcloud, users can edit and share documents, chat and hold video conferences, and manage emails, contacts and calendars via easy web and mobile apps. The open-source software has a modular design and can be extended with hundreds of apps. It runs on premises in a private cloud or with a trusted provider.

Founded in 2016, Nextcloud is fully employee-owned and has grown organically ever since. Learn more at www.nextcloud.com.

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