Vienna-based eustella wants to be Europe’s AI champion and a true sovereign ChatGPT alternative. Its strategy isn’t to wall itself off, but to use the world’s best open models to build a truly sovereign alternative.
Europe has a voracious appetite for artificial intelligence, but it’s a diet supplied almost entirely from abroad. There are 133 million active AI users on the continent – nearly twice the number in the United States. Yet over 90 percent of them are feeding their prompts into American software such as ChatGPT, training and strengthening Silicon Valley’s systems. Despite polls showing that two-thirds of Europeans would prefer to use homegrown technology, a genuine, mainstream rival to the US giants has failed to emerge. A Vienna-based startup, eustella, is now launching to fill that void, but its strategy is more pragmatic and globally-minded than the “fortress Europe” approach some might expect.
Time for a ChatGPT alternative: Europe has a product problem, not a talent problem
The continent is not short on AI expertise. Austrian developer Peter Steinberger, for example, created OpenClaw, one of the world’s most capable agentic AI projects. The problem, as eustella’s founders see it, is translating that talent into accessible, user-friendly products that can compete on a global scale. Too often, Europe’s best innovations end up being absorbed by overseas tech giants.
“Europe has failed to produce a genuine rival to ChatGPT or Claude, despite overwhelming demand for one. That’s exactly the gap eustella is built to fill,” says Matteo Rosoli, CEO of the Vienna-based startup.
Eustella aims to take the agentic power of complex tools like OpenClaw and package it into a simple mobile-first application. Where traditional chatbots provide one-off answers, eustella is built around AI agents – virtual assistants that can execute multi-step tasks on their own. Instead of just answering a question, an agent can curate a Spotify playlist, manage your calendar, deliver a personalised morning news briefing, or analyse your personal finances, connecting with Europe’s most popular apps. It is, in essence, an attempt to build the smart, proactive assistant that Siri always promised to be but never quite delivered.
Sovereignty means control, not a European cage
The startup’s core mission is to advance European digital sovereignty, but it defines the term with a crucial distinction. For eustella, sovereignty is not autarky – a futile attempt to build everything from scratch in isolation. Instead, it is about control: the ability to decide for yourself what tools you use and under what conditions. The company points to champions of European industry like Airbus and ASML, which dominate their fields not by shunning international suppliers, but by masterfully orchestrating global supply chains while retaining control over core design, data, and system integration.
“What matters is not the origin of the model, but that the user retains control: over their data, their freedom of choice, the transparency of the system,” the company argues in an online post. The true measure of sovereignty, they claim, is not the flag on the server, but the power over the code.
This philosophy directly informs eustella’s technology choices. The key difference is between a closed model from a US corporation, accessed via an API that sends user data overseas, and an open-weight model which can be run on European servers, audited, modified, and controlled entirely within Europe.
As long as Europe fails to produce a sufficient number of competitive, open foundation models – with France’s Mistral being a notable but rare exception – rejecting powerful open-source alternatives would mean accepting a permanent dependency on a few US corporations. For eustella, an auditable open-weight model on a European server is a far smaller risk than a black-box API from Silicon Valley.
Austrian engineering, European values
While leveraging global open-source technology, eustella’s foundations are firmly planted in Europe. Backed by Austrian business angels Hansi Hansmann and Hermann Futter, the company pledges that all hosting and data processing will run on European servers, ensuring full GDPR compliance. Its principles also include a strict refusal of any military or mass surveillance partnerships, a commitment baked into its founding in neutral Austria.
“We want European AI innovation to stay in Europe — so we can compete at the frontier without abandoning the values that define us: safety and privacy by design,” Rosoli explains.
The company opened its waitlist in March 2026 for its iPhone and Android apps, which can be joined at eustella.com. A closed beta launched to over 2,000 users a month later. With plans for collaborative social features and tailored solutions for businesses, eustella is not just building an app. It is proposing a new, more pragmatic model for European tech. The approach suggests the answer to the AI race is not to blindly follow Silicon Valley, but to take what is open and build something new, under Europe’s own terms.
