Cybersecurity startup Soverli on Monday announced raising $2.6 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Founderful, with additional support from ETH Zurich Foundation, Venture Kick, and angel investors.
An ETH Zurich spin-off, Zurich, Switzerland-based Soverli is building a sovereign smartphone platform focused on user security.
The operating system can run alongside Android or iOS on standard mobile phones, independent and isolated from them.
By enabling multiple isolated OSes to run on the same device simultaneously, Soverli provides users with both the experience of their mobile platform of choice, and the security benefits of the sovereign OS.
Users can switch to the sovereign OS with the press of a button, benefiting from increased security even if the Android/iOS platform is malicious or has been infected with malware or spyware.
The main benefit of the solution, Soverli says, is that the OS is compatible with commercial smartphones without hardware modifications or impact on user experience.
The platform does not remove features, nor does it restrict applications or require users to reboot when switching between OSes.
Early prototypes of the solution were developed at ETH and have received increased interest from governments, public-sector entities, and enterprises, which eventually led to the spin-off.
Focused on mission-critical communication, Soverli’s first application is being tested by emergency response and critical infrastructure entities.
The startup will use the pre-seed funding to grow its engineering team, scale OEM partnerships, build support for additional device models, and improve integrations with MDM systems.
“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,” Soverli co-founder and CEO Ivan Puddu said.
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