Swiss cloud provider Infomaniak has done something that almost no European tech company has had the nerve — or the legal architecture — to do. On 13 May 2026, founder Boris Siegenthaler handed the majority of his company’s voting rights to the Infomaniak Foundation, a Swiss public-interest foundation, in a move that is legally irrevocable and deliberately designed to make the company impossible to acquire. Not difficult. Impossible.
- The Infomaniak Foundation now holds majority voting rights in Infomaniak Group SA, making hostile takeovers structurally impossible.
- Founder Boris Siegenthaler transferred control to the Infomaniak Foundation on 13 May 2026 in an irrevocable, notarised legal move.
- The foundation model protects millions of users’ data from foreign acquisition pressure, extraterritorial laws, and investor overreach.
- Up to 5% of Infomaniak’s annual profit will fund public-interest projects in digital sovereignty, ethical tech, and environmental causes.
What the Infomaniak Foundation Actually Does
The Infomaniak Foundation isn’t a marketing exercise. It’s a structural legal entity recognised under Swiss law, operating under the ongoing supervision of Geneva’s cantonal authorities. The foundation now holds a special class of shares in Infomaniak Group SA — shares that carry permanent blocking power and can never be transferred to another party. That’s the key detail. This isn’t a pledge or a policy statement. It’s a notarised document with teeth.
As the reference shareholder, the Infomaniak Foundation doesn’t get involved in daily operations. It’s a silent guardian that only steps in at critical junctures — a sale, a merger, a change in mission. Think of it less like a board member and more like a constitutional court for the company itself. It holds the line so that nobody else has to fight the same battle twice.
The foundation’s governing document is the Shareholding Charter, a nine-principle framework that defines what the company must always be. These principles — covering independence, digital sovereignty, environmental responsibility, and more — can be strengthened over time, but never weakened. That asymmetry is intentional and meaningful.
Why Siegenthaler Made the Move Now
The honest answer is: because the window for doing this safely was closing. Siegenthaler had been pursuing a gradual employee-ownership model for years. By the time of the transfer, 36 staff members already held 25% of Infomaniak’s capital. The plan was elegant in theory — a slow, values-aligned handover to the people who built the company.
But it had a structural weakness. If several employee-shareholders left at the same time, the company would face a significant share buyback obligation. More critically, if Siegenthaler himself died, his heirs — who have no involvement in running the business — would have inherited a majority of voting rights. In the current climate, that’s an open invitation to acquisition.
And the current climate is precisely the problem. The European cloud market has been under sustained pressure. US hyperscalers — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud — continue to expand their grip on European enterprise infrastructure. Meanwhile, legislation like the US CLOUD Act means data stored with American-owned providers can be accessed by US authorities regardless of where the servers physically sit. That’s not a hypothetical. It’s a legal reality that European businesses are increasingly waking up to.
Add to that the geopolitical volatility of 2025 and 2026 — trade tensions, shifting alliances, debates over digital sovereignty at the EU level — and it becomes clear why Siegenthaler felt urgency.
Source: https://news.infomaniak.com/en/infomaniak-foundation-sovereign-cloud/
