TL;DR
Yes, it's long. It's a manifesto — brevity isn't really the genre. But if you're a busy person who already routes their money and data through American infrastructure, the least we can do is offer a sovereign version that respects your time:
The problem. When Europeans sell digital goods, the money, the customer data, and the strategic leverage all flow through American rails — Stripe, Paddle, AWS — governed by laws written in Washington. Europe builds world-class software and then rents out its own cash register.
Why now. The legal cover for US clouds has collapsed twice (Schrems I & II). The CLOUD Act and FISA 702 mean "EU region of AWS" is not sovereignty — it's sovereignty cosplay. Europe wrote a magnificent rulebook (DSA, DMA, MiCA, DORA, the AI Act) and forgot to build the platforms to run it on. And AI just cut the cost of building a rival commerce platform by roughly an order of magnitude.
The empty lane. "EU merchant-of-record for the creator and SaaS economy" is a multi-billion-euro category growing 20%+ a year — and its category leader does not exist. Every incumbent is American or British in the way that actually matters in a courtroom.
What we built. Lernaura. One product: a European Merchant of Record at 5% + €0.50 — parity with the incumbents on price, deliberately. The creator software is free. The same rails are available headlessly via API. No US-owned link in the chain. AI-native from the foundation, not bolted on afterwards.
The two moats. Sovereignty (auditable, EU-licensed, no CLOUD Act exposure) and Intelligence (AI runs every workflow — not a chatbot taped to a 2018 dashboard).
The ask. Found a competitor, fund one of us, or switch your stack. We'd genuinely rather Europe have four serious contenders in this category by 2028 than zero.
The promise. We won't sell to an American acquirer, won't move off European-sovereign infrastructure to chase a margin, and won't call a bolted-on chatbot "innovation."
We are moving fast. We would like company.
The long version — with all the receipts — starts here. ⬇️
The conversation we keep avoiding
For twenty years I have led data platforms, sat on boards, watched the European software industry build genuinely world-class products — and then, almost without exception, route the resulting money, the customer data, and the strategic dependency through American infrastructure.
We tell ourselves a story about this. The story is that the Americans got there first, that scale is a one-way ratchet, that interoperability and open standards make ownership irrelevant. The story is convenient because it requires nothing of us.
The story is also wrong, and I think a growing number of European founders, regulators, and CFOs now privately know it is wrong. What they lack is not the analysis. What they lack is a credible alternative — a company they can point to and say: here, this one, this is what a sovereign EU commerce layer looks like, and it is better than the American option, and I am switching.
I am building that company. This essay is the argument for why it needs to exist, why now is the moment, and why a single company — not a consortium, not a directive, not a subsidy programme — is the only thing that has ever changed the answer to "who owns the rails."
What I mean by "the rails"
When a European creator sells a course in Madrid to a buyer in Helsinki, when a German SaaS company invoices an Italian agency, when a Danish coach takes a subscription payment from a French member — the money and the data flow through a stack of services that almost always includes:
- A payment processor (usually Stripe, in Ireland but ultimately American)
- A merchant-of-record service for tax and compliance (usually Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, FastSpring, Cleverbridge — none European in any meaningful sense)
- A cloud provider for the data (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure — all three subject to the US CLOUD Act regardless of which region the bytes physically sit in)
- A content delivery layer, an authentication layer, an AI inference layer — and each of these, with vanishingly few exceptions, is American-owned
This is the commerce layer of the European internet. It is not regulated, it is not auditable in any meaningful sense, and it is owned by foreign jurisdictions with their own laws, their own intelligence services, and their own ideas about what European data is for.
Every European creator and SaaS founder pays a tax on this arrangement. Some of it is denominated in dollars and cents — a take rate, a per-transaction fee, an FX spread. Most of it is denominated in something harder to see: the slow erosion of the leverage you have over your own business when the entity that holds your money and your customer relationships answers to a regulator on a different continent.
What changed
For most of the 2010s, you could plausibly argue that the convenience of American infrastructure outweighed the abstract sovereignty cost. You can no longer plausibly argue that. Three things changed.
The legal foundation collapsed, twice. Schrems I invalidated Safe Harbor in 2015. Schrems II invalidated Privacy Shield in 2020. The current EU–US Data Privacy Framework, agreed in 2023, is already in litigation, and any serious privacy lawyer in Europe will tell you in private that Schrems III is a matter of when, not whether. The legal mechanism that allows American clouds to process European data is built on sand, and we have watched it wash out twice.
The geopolitical premium became impossible to ignore. The Trump-era CLOUD Act of 2018 made it explicit: a US-headquartered cloud provider must hand over customer data to US authorities on lawful request, regardless of where the data is physically stored. FISA 702, renewed in 2024, gives the US intelligence community broad latitude over non-US persons' data held by US companies. These are not theoretical concerns. They are written into American law, and no contractual term offered by an American vendor can override them.
The regulatory ground in Europe shifted. The Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, MiCA, PSD3 and the Payment Services Regulation, DORA, NIS2, the AI Act, the Instant Payments Regulation, DAC7, the OSS and IOSS regimes — Europe spent the first half of this decade building, with extraordinary thoroughness, a regulatory architecture that assumes financial and data infrastructure can be governed at the European level. We built the rules. We did not build the platforms to run on them. The asymmetry is now obvious to anyone who looks.
Add to this a fourth change, less geopolitical and more technological: artificial intelligence has made it possible to build the sort of vertical-integrated commerce platform that would have required hundreds of engineers in 2015 with a tenth of that team today. The economic moat that protected incumbent payment companies — operational complexity at scale — has been substantially eroded by a generation of models that can read tax codes, draft dispute responses, reconcile cross-border ledgers, and answer customer questions in twenty-four languages simultaneously.
The defensibility of the incumbent commerce layer was always partly about who had the legal infrastructure to operate it and who had the people to run it. Both of those advantages are now in play.
The opportunity, stated bluntly
There is a category called "merchant of record for digital goods, SaaS, and the creator economy in the European Union." It is currently worth several billion euros a year in take rates, and it is growing at twenty-plus percent annually. The category leader does not exist. The category has Paddle, which is British-headquartered and American-funded; Lemon Squeezy, which is now part of Stripe and therefore part of the American payment establishment; FastSpring and Cleverbridge, American; Digistore24, German-resident but architecturally indistinguishable from any other 2010s-era reseller; Gumroad, American and increasingly indifferent to European compliance.
None of these companies is European in the way that matters — owned by European entities, operating on European infrastructure, regulated by European authorities, with the strategic interests of European creators and software companies as their primary commitment. Several of them have European subsidiaries, European bank accounts, European employees. None of them passes the test that any serious European procurement officer in 2027 will be required to ask: if the United States invokes the CLOUD Act against your parent company tomorrow, what happens to my customer data, my settlement balances, and my business continuity?
The honest answer, from every single one of them, is: it depends on the warrant.
The honest answer from Lernaura, and from the company we are building, is: the question does not apply, because we are not subject to US jurisdiction, we do not run on US-owned infrastructure, and our settlement is not routed through US payment networks.
That is the position. It is currently available to anyone willing to actually build for it. As of the moment I am writing this, in June 2026, I do not know of another company that has taken the position fully — hardware-level sovereignty in the data layer, European-licensed payments infrastructure, a credible path to European-issued e-money and stablecoin settlement, and an AI-native product surface that doesn't read like a 2018 dashboard with a chatbot bolted on.
The lane is open. I am writing this in part because lanes do not stay open forever, and I would rather Europe have three or four serious contenders in this category by 2028 than zero.
What we are actually building
Lernaura started as a creator platform — courses, communities, newsletters, events — for European creators who were tired of running their business on American tools that didn't understand European tax law, didn't respect European data, and didn't have the AI sophistication that a creator in 2026 expects from the software they pay for.
It became clear that the most defensible part of what we were building was not the creator-facing product. It was the merchant-of-record and compliance layer underneath. The hardest, most regulated, most operationally complex part of running a digital-goods business in Europe is collecting and remitting twenty-seven flavors of VAT, filing DAC7 returns, handling DSA seller verification, processing cross-border chargebacks, and doing all of it without leaking customer data to a foreign jurisdiction. We are building that layer because we need it. Then we realised that everyone who sells digital goods in Europe needs it, and almost no one builds it natively.
So let me state what Lernaura actually is, because this is the part that I have changed my mind about most decisively in the last six months.
Lernaura is a commerce infrastructure company. One product, one price: a European merchant-of-record at five percent plus fifty cents per transaction, parity with Paddle and Lemon Squeezy, deliberately. Everything else we have built — the course tools, the community features, the newsletter engine, the event handling, the AI-native creator surface — is free. There is no subscription. There is no platform fee. There are no tiers.
The creator software is not the product. The creator software is the reason creators bring their GMV to us instead of to the American incumbents. It is the most opinionated, most useful, most AI-native reference implementation of what European commerce infrastructure looks like when you build it from scratch in 2026 — and we give it away, because the business is the rails underneath.
This is not a discount. It is a structural choice. The creator-software category is in the middle of a brutal race to the bottom — Kajabi was discounting its $369-a-month plan to an effective $33 a month during the period I was writing this essay. Competing on subscription pricing against companies prepared to do that is a category mistake. The right move is to refuse to compete in that category at all and to make the software so good, and so free, that the comparison stops being a pricing comparison and becomes an architecture comparison.
The same five-percent-plus-fifty-cents rail is also available headlessly, through a public API, to SaaS vendors, indie developers, competing creator platforms, and anyone else who wants European-compliant MoR-as-a-service. Same product, same price, same infrastructure. The creator suite is one front-end into the rails. There will be many others. Long term, the headless channel is by far the larger business — the same way that the largest payment processors are not the ones running the most visible storefronts.
We are not trying to win this market on price. Buyers acquired on price are lost on price. We are trying to win it on the two things that matter and that the incumbents structurally cannot match: sovereignty and intelligence.
Sovereignty, for us, means specific and auditable things. Our database has moved from Supabase to Scaleway, a French-owned company operating in French data centres, because "EU region of an American cloud" is not the same thing as "European sovereign infrastructure" and the difference will matter in court. Our payment processor is Mollie, a Dutch-licensed entity. Our application layer runs on Scalingo, a French platform. Our VAT, DAC7, and DSA compliance is built and operated by us, in Denmark, under Danish OSS registration. There is no US-owned link in the chain. That is the standard, and it took deliberate engineering decisions to achieve. It is not something an incumbent platform can claim by changing its terms of service.
Intelligence, for us, means that the product was designed from day one assuming that the operator of every important workflow would be an AI system, not a human. Course creation, marketing copy, transcript generation, chargeback response, fraud decisioning, tax classification, customer support — all of these are workflows in which a properly designed AI agent outperforms a 2018-era SaaS dashboard by a factor of five to ten on speed, by a factor of two to three on cost, and by a substantial margin on consistency. Our competitors will eventually figure this out. They will not figure it out in time, because the architectural decisions that make AI-native operation possible are decisions you make at the foundation of the codebase, not in a Q3 product update.
Why this matters beyond Lernaura
I would like to be very direct about what is and is not at stake.
What is at stake is not whether a Danish creator can sell a course to a Dutch buyer next year. That will keep working. American infrastructure will keep functioning, European creators will keep using it, and the world will keep turning.
What is at stake is whether, ten years from now, the commerce layer of the European internet is something that Europeans own, govern, and benefit from — or whether it is something Europeans rent from a small number of American companies under terms set in California and adjudicated in courts in Washington. That question is being decided right now, not by any single regulation or any single funding announcement, but by which companies actually get built and which ones do not.
For a long time, the European answer to this kind of question has been industrial policy: the European Commission funds a research project, a national champion is selected, a strategic plan is drafted. I have enormous respect for the people doing that work. It is necessary. It is not sufficient. The companies that actually own categories in commerce are not the ones that were planned into existence by government. They are the ones that some founder decided to build, found a real customer for, and refused to give up on for a decade.
If Europe wants its own Stripe — and we very obviously should — then someone has to actually build it. I am building it. I would like there to be three or four other companies in this category by 2028, attacking it from different angles, because that is how categories form. Single-player categories rarely produce winners. They produce extractive monopolies.
So this is also an invitation. If you are a founder, a regulator, an investor, a procurement officer, a creator, or a SaaS operator who has read this far and is nodding along: the next move is yours. Found a competitor. Fund one of us. Switch your stack. Write your own version of this essay. Make the case to your board that "EU region of AWS" is not the answer for the next ten years even if it was the answer for the last ten.
What I am asking from the people who read this
Three things, in rough order of importance.
If you are a European creator, coach, course-maker, community operator, newsletter writer, or independent SaaS founder: look at where your money currently flows and ask yourself the hard question. Is your settlement bank American? Is your MoR American? Is your cloud American? If you would not be willing to bet your business on the answer to "what happens if my American vendor is forced to terminate me with thirty days' notice," consider that this is exactly the bet you are currently making. We are now open for European creators, and we would like to be open for you.
If you are an investor — European or otherwise — who has been waiting for the credible EU sovereign commerce play: I think the case is now obvious enough that you are running out of reasons to keep waiting. The regulatory tailwind is real, the infrastructure to build on actually exists, the AI inflection has lowered the cost of competing with incumbents by an order of magnitude, and the category is genuinely empty. The companies that get built in this category over the next eighteen months will define it for the decade. I am not running a process at the moment, but I am happy to have a serious conversation with anyone who reads this essay and thinks the right thought afterwards.
If you are a regulator or a policymaker: the single most useful thing you can do for sovereign EU commerce infrastructure is not another funding programme. It is to make the procurement preference for sovereign EU vendors explicit, measurable, and binding. The market will respond. It is already starting to respond. Make it unambiguous, and the response will be much faster.
The promise
I will close with the promise that I want to make to the European creator and SaaS economy, because manifestos are worth nothing without commitments.
We will not sell to an American acquirer. We will not move our infrastructure off European-sovereign hardware to chase a margin. We will not bolt AI features onto a 2018 codebase and call it innovation; we will build the AI-native commerce layer that European founders deserve, and we will do it in public, with our reasoning open and our roadmap legible. We will price the rails at parity with the global incumbents — five percent plus fifty cents, no more, no less — because the value we are offering is worth the same money the incumbents charge and the difference is in what you actually get for it. We will give the creator software away, indefinitely, because the rails are the business and the software is the proof. We will hold ourselves to a standard of sovereignty, intelligence, and compliance that is higher than the regulation requires, because the regulation is a floor and we are trying to build a ceiling.
If we do this well, we will be remembered as the company that proved Europe could build its own commerce layer. If we do it badly, someone else will do it after us, because the underlying logic is now unstoppable and the lane is too obvious to stay empty forever.
Either way, the conversation has changed. The era of accepting American commerce infrastructure as a permanent fact of European business life is ending. What replaces it is now a question of which European founders move fastest, which European investors fund them, and which European buyers actually switch.
We are moving fast. We would like company.
— Heine Iversen, København, June 2026