The EU Inc Initiative: Who Is Driving the 28th Regime

The campaign

EU Inc began as a campaign, not a law. In 2024, a founder-led initiative went public with a simple argument: a startup in Europe should be able to incorporate once and operate across the whole single market, the way a US company incorporates in Delaware and sells across all 50 states. The name says it plainly. Europe needed its own "Inc".

The petition launched on 14 October 2024, led by entrepreneur and angel investor Andreas Klinger with three co-initiators, Philipp Herkelmann, Simon Schaefer and Vojtech Horna (who also created the earlier Not Optional campaign for European stock-option reform that EU Inc builds on). It asked the EU for one thing: an optional, digital, EU-wide company form, the 28th Regime. It gathered more than 13,000 signatures by December 2024 and over 24,000 by 2026.

The founders and investors behind it

The initiative's strength is its signatory list. It is backed by more than 24,000 founders and investors across Europe, including the founders and CEOs of Stripe, Wise, Mistral and Revolut (Patrick Collison, Taavet Hinrikus, Arthur Mensch and Nikolay Storonsky), alongside names such as Niklas Zennström, Ilkka Paananen, Sebastian Siemiatkowski and Paul Graham. That breadth is the point: it is not one company lobbying for itself, but a cross-section of European tech saying the same thing about how hard it is to build across 27 legal systems.

Investors joined for the same reason. Funds that back companies in several countries feel the friction of fragmented company law at every round, every cross-border hire, and every option grant.

The reports that gave it weight

Campaigns need intellectual cover, and EU Inc got it from two of the most influential EU reports in recent memory:

• Enrico Letta, "Much more than a market" (April 2024), argued that legal fragmentation holds European companies back and floated a common European legal status.
• Mario Draghi, "The future of European competitiveness" (September 2024), explicitly recommended a 28th regime for innovative companies.

Together they turned a founder demand into mainstream EU policy thinking. The detail of what they proposed is covered in the 28th Regime.

The political backing

The idea then climbed the institutions. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen put a 28th regime in her 2024-2029 political guidelines and, at Davos in January 2026, publicly adopted the campaign's name: "We call it EU Inc." Michael McGrath, the Commissioner for justice and the rule of law, led the file and presented the proposal, which followed on 18 March 2026. In the European Parliament, René Repasi, a German Social Democrat MEP, is the lead rapporteur steering it through the Legal Affairs Committee. You can trace that whole arc in EU Inc news.

What the initiative wants

Stripped down, the ask is a single, optional EU company that is:

• Digital by default, set up online in around 48 hours.
• Cheap to start, around €100, with no minimum capital.
• Valid EU-wide, recognised in all 27 member states from day one.
• Startup-friendly, with one EU-wide framework for employee stock options.

The deeper goal is to stop European founders defaulting to a US incorporation to raise and scale. EU Inc is the campaign to keep more of that company-building in Europe.