Today, 29.03.2026
Good morning, Human. The week closes with a question that keeps surfacing across European tech: what does it actually mean to own your digital infrastructure? Three stories this week offer different answers – a productivity suite built on European servers, a biotech platform targeting proteins that conventional drugs cannot reach, and a semiconductor company betting that copper can outrun light. Each represents a distinct theory about where value accrues when geopolitics reshapes technology markets.
The Sovereignty Play
A coalition of European technology companies this week unveiled Euro-Office, an open-source office suite designed to provide a fully sovereign, Microsoft-compatible alternative to established productivity platforms. The initiative brings together IONOS, Nextcloud, OpenProject, and several other European firms under a shared governance framework, with a technical preview already available on GitHub and a stable release expected this summer.
The timing is not accidental. Digital sovereignty has moved from policy papers to procurement decisions. France has begun replacing US-based collaboration tools across government agencies. Germany's state of Schleswig-Holstein is migrating tens of thousands of workstations to open-source stacks. Denmark's data protection authority previously ordered municipalities to curtail Google Workspace in schools over data transfer risks. The US CLOUD Act – which allows American authorities to compel US companies to hand over data stored anywhere in the world – has transformed what was once an abstract concern into a concrete compliance question.
Euro-Office arrives alongside Office.eu, a separate initiative that launched in The Hague earlier this month. Office.eu, built on Nextcloud Hub with Collabora Online as its document editing layer, describes itself as 100% European-owned and running entirely on European data centres. According to Silicon Republic, early access has attracted nearly 15,000 applicants, with a phased European rollout planned for Q2 2026.
The question is whether these alternatives can scale. Forrester senior analyst Dario Maisto told Silicon Republic that alternatives to Microsoft and Google products are getting attention but may not scale in the near future, citing issues such as lack of enterprise-grade support, feature disparities, and migration friction. Microsoft and Google are developing more sovereign alternatives of their own offerings to cater to new sovereignty needs. The presence of alternatives, Maisto noted, is pushing the incumbents to do more on the sovereignty front – but does not yet represent a true challenge to their market positioning.
What to watch: whether public sector procurement decisions create enough demand to sustain these platforms through the feature-parity gap. The mechanism matters more than the announcement.
The Funding Picture
Utrecht-based biotech Laigo Bio completed the final close of its oversubscribed seed financing round this week, bringing total funding to €17 million. The round was co-led by Biovance Capital and Kurma Partners, with participation from Curie Capital, Argobio Studio, Angelini Ventures, Eurazeo, Oncode Bridge Fund, ROM Utrecht Region, and Cancer Research Horizons.
The company's SureTACs platform – Surface Removal Targeting Chimeras – generates bispecific antibodies that pair E3 ligases with disease-causing target proteins to stimulate their degradation. The approach targets membrane proteins that have been validated as disease drivers but have eluded conventional drug discovery. According to European Biotechnology, early data suggest SureTACs could outperform blocking antibodies through deeper pathway inhibition – though clinical proof remains the key milestone ahead.
The investor syndicate tells a story about European biotech capital formation. Biovance Capital, Portugal's leading life sciences venture capital firm, manages a €60 million fund backed by the European Investment Fund and the European Commission through the Portugal Tech and InvestEU programmes. Kurma Partners, part of the Eurazeo group, has built successive funds in early-stage biotechnology across Paris and Munich. The round demonstrates that European biotech can assemble serious capital without crossing the Atlantic – at least at seed stage.
The Infrastructure Bet
Swiss semiconductor company Kandou AI raised $225 million in what it calls a Series A round, led by Maverick Silicon with strategic participation from SoftBank, Synopsys, Cadence Design Systems, and Alchip Technologies. The round values the company at $400 million.
The label deserves scrutiny: Kandou was founded in 2011 and previously raised more than $163 million across Series B and C rounds under the name Kandou Bus. The "Series A" designation reflects a rebrand and leadership change under CEO Srujan Linga, a former Goldman Sachs managing director who took over in 2025 from founder Amin Shokrollahi.
What makes Kandou AI's position unusual is the material it proposes to solve the AI interconnect bottleneck with: copper, not optics. The company's Chord signalling technology claims to achieve path-to-Shannon-capacity efficiency, reducing power consumption and system costs while extending copper links to 448 gigabits per second and beyond. If that claim holds, it would mean that the billions being spent on optical interconnect transitions are at least partially premature.
The investor composition matters more than the headline figure. Synopsys and Cadence are the two dominant providers of electronic design automation tools. Their participation signals potential integration of Kandou AI's serialiser/deserialiser intellectual property into the design flows that chip architects use to build processors and memory controllers. This is a licensing and IP model, similar in structure to Arm's approach in mobile processors.
At $400 million, Kandou AI is valued at roughly a tenth of Ayar Labs (which raised $500 million in March 2026 at a $3.8 billion valuation for optical interconnects) and an eighth of what Marvell paid for Celestial AI. That gap could reflect market scepticism about copper's longevity – or it could reflect the fact that copper is already in every data centre, and Kandou's technology does not require the industry to rip out its existing wiring.
The Market Signal
The week's largest deal came from outside the AI infrastructure space but carries implications for European tech more broadly. Primary Wave Music announced a definitive agreement to acquire Kobalt, the London-headquartered music publishing and technology platform, from Francisco Partners. The transaction includes an investment from Brookfield and is expected to close in Q3 2026.
According to Variety, the combined entity could control assets exceeding $7 billion. For Francisco Partners, the sale could represent a swift and lucrative exit – Music Business Worldwide reports the deal could value Kobalt at north of $1.5 billion, approximately double the $750 million valuation at which FP acquired the company in 2022.
Kobalt founder Willard Ahdritz will step down from his role as chairman upon closing. In a statement, Ahdritz noted that he founded Kobalt 25 years ago with a clear vision: creators deserved better, and the digital music industry needed the technology, scale, and transparency of a modern tech company. The company's royalty platform and digital collection society amra represent exactly the kind of infrastructure play that European tech has historically struggled to scale – and that American capital has historically been willing to acquire.
The Numbers That Matter
€17M – Laigo Bio's total seed funding, oversubscribed with participation from nine institutional investors across Portugal, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and the UK.
$225M – Kandou AI's Series A round, the largest in the company's 15-year history, bringing total funding to approximately $388 million.
$7B+ – Estimated combined assets of Primary Wave and Kobalt post-acquisition, creating a scaled independent alternative to major label publishing models.
15,000 – Early access applicants for Office.eu, according to the company, ahead of its Q2 2026 European rollout.
85% – US cloud providers' share of the European market, according to Synergy Research Group data cited by CNBC.
The Week Ahead
The AI Act's high-risk system guidance remains overdue from the European Commission, with implementation teams across the continent waiting for clarity on compliance requirements. The Euro-Office technical preview on GitHub offers an early look at what European-built productivity software actually delivers. And the Kobalt acquisition will move through regulatory review, testing whether music publishing consolidation faces the same scrutiny as tech platform mergers.
The Thought That Lingers
Three different bets on where value accrues when infrastructure becomes contested: in the software layer (Euro-Office), in the biological mechanism (Laigo Bio), in the physical interconnect (Kandou AI). Each assumes that the current arrangement – American platforms, American capital, American standards – is less permanent than it appears. The question is not whether Europe can build alternatives. The question is whether alternatives can reach the scale where they become defaults. That transition has happened before, in mobile payments and privacy regulation. Whether it happens in productivity software, biotech platforms, or semiconductor IP depends on decisions being made this quarter, in procurement offices and investment committees across the continent.
These questions – about sovereignty, scale, and where European tech actually competes – are exactly what Human x AI Europe will be working through in Vienna on May 19. If the week's news has you thinking about where the ecosystem goes from here, that's the room to be in.
Human×AI Daily Brief is compiled from Francisco Partners, Tech.eu, The Next Web, Music Business Worldwide, Variety, Silicon Republic, European Biotechnology, BioSpace, Laigo Bio, Office.eu, and Trending Topics. This is meant to be useful, not comprehensive.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What is Euro-Office and how does it differ from Office.eu?
A: Euro-Office is a coalition-backed open-source office suite unveiled this week by IONOS, Nextcloud, and other European firms, with a stable release expected summer 2026. Office.eu is a separate initiative that launched in The Hague in March 2026, built on Nextcloud Hub with Collabora Online, already accepting early access applications with 15,000 signups reported.
Q: What is Laigo Bio's SureTACs platform and why did it attract €17M in seed funding?
A: SureTACs (Surface Removal Targeting Chimeras) are bispecific antibodies that pair E3 ligases with disease-causing membrane proteins to trigger their degradation. The platform targets proteins considered "undruggable" by conventional therapeutics, with applications in oncology and autoimmune diseases. The oversubscribed round was co-led by Biovance Capital and Kurma Partners.
Q: Why is Kandou AI betting on copper interconnects when the industry is moving to optics?
A: Kandou AI's Chord signalling technology claims to achieve 448+ gigabits per second speeds while reducing power consumption by 10x compared to alternatives. The company argues copper is already installed in every data centre, making adoption faster and cheaper than optical transitions. At $400M valuation, it's priced at roughly one-tenth of optical competitor Ayar Labs.
Q: What does the US CLOUD Act mean for European organisations using American software?
A: The US CLOUD Act allows American authorities to compel US companies to hand over data stored anywhere in the world, including on European servers. This creates compliance and data sovereignty concerns for European organisations, driving interest in European-owned alternatives like Office.eu and Euro-Office that operate entirely on EU infrastructure.
Q: How much is Kobalt being acquired for and what happens to its operations?
A: While exact terms were not disclosed, reports suggest the deal values Kobalt at approximately $1.5 billion – roughly double the $750 million Francisco Partners paid in 2022. Kobalt will remain a separate, standalone entity under CEO Laurent Hubert, maintaining its "creator first" philosophy. The transaction is expected to close in Q3 2026.
Q: What drives the current European digital sovereignty movement in tech?
A: The movement is driven by the US CLOUD Act allowing American authorities to access data globally, GDPR compliance concerns, and geopolitical tensions. France is replacing US collaboration tools in government, Germany's Schleswig-Holstein is migrating to open-source stacks, and Denmark ordered municipalities to curtail Google Workspace in schools over data transfer risks.