Soverli is Developing a Sovereign Smartphone Architecture

Soverli, an ETH-Zurich spin-off, led by Ivan Puddu and Moritz Schneider, has secured $2.6 million in pre-seed funding led by Founderful, with participation from the ETH Zurich Foundation, Venture Kick, and cybersecurity industry figures.

Built on four years of ETH Zurich research, Soverli’s patent-pending technology runs multiple isolated operating systems on a single device, enabling a sovereign OS to operate alongside Android on standard smartphones with fast, seamless switching.

Soverli demonstrated Signal running inside its sovereign OS, isolated from Android to reduce the attack surface and protect messages even if Android is compromised, without requiring hardware changes or limiting use on standard smartphones.

Soverli frames its product as part of Europe’s push for digital sovereignty, targeting smartphones as a critical gap in secure communications. Early ETH Zurich prototypes attracted public-sector, enterprise, and industry interest, leading to the company’s spin-out.

Soverli is initially targeting mission-critical communications, with public-sector pilots in emergency response and critical infrastructure. Its isolated OS can keep communications running even if the primary OS is disrupted, with potential expansion into secure enterprise and BYOD use cases.

With the new funding, Soverli will grow its engineering team, expand device support, deepen MDM integrations, and scale OEM partnerships.