Soverli, a Switzerland-based cybersecurity company focused on mobile digital sovereignty, has emerged from stealth after securing fresh pre-seed funding aimed at reshaping how smartphones are secured and audited.
The company has raised $2.6m in a pre-seed funding round led by Founderful, with participation from the ETH Zurich Foundation, Venture Kick and a group of cybersecurity specialists with backgrounds in high-assurance systems and trusted computing.
Founded as a spin-out from research conducted at ETH Zurich, Soverli is developing a sovereign smartphone architecture designed to operate alongside Android and iOS, rather than replacing them. Its technology allows multiple operating systems to run simultaneously and in isolation on a single device, enabling users to retain the full functionality of Android while accessing a parallel, fully auditable sovereign operating system at the press of a button.
The company’s approach is intended to address what it describes as a critical gap in Europe’s push for digital sovereignty. While billions are being invested in sovereign cloud infrastructure, AI and national networks, smartphones remain largely opaque systems controlled by third-party operating system providers. Soverli argues this creates systemic risks, particularly for governments, emergency services and critical industries that depend on mobile devices for mission-critical operations.
Soverli plans to use the new funding to expand its engineering team, extend compatibility across a wider range of smartphone models, deepen integrations with mobile device management platforms and scale partnerships with original equipment manufacturers. The longer-term ambition is to establish a new software-layering standard that enables sovereign-grade security on consumer-grade smartphones without compromising usability.
As part of early demonstrations, the company has shown how secure messaging applications such as Signal can run entirely within its sovereign operating system. By significantly reducing the attack surface and isolating applications from Android, messages remain protected even if the primary operating system is compromised by malware or spyware. Crucially, the architecture requires no hardware modifications and works on commercially available smartphones.
Interest in the technology has grown among public-sector organisations, emergency response teams and enterprises exploring secure bring-your-own-device strategies. Public-sector pilots are already under way, focusing initially on mission-critical communications where availability and continuity are essential, particularly in the event of software failures or malicious attacks.
Soverli co-founder and CEO Ivan Puddu said, “Availability is mission-critical, yet organizations still rely on operating systems they cannot control or audit. We built a fully-auditable smartphone sovereign layer that stays operational even when Android is compromised. It’s a paradigm shift: instead of hoping the OS never breaks, Soverli guarantees continuity if it does, without forcing users to give up the modern smartphone experience they expect.”
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