Infomaniak secures its independence and its DNA for the long term • Infomaniak

Since 1994, Infomaniak has followed the same path: privacy, environmental responsibility, and local roots. Thirty-two years on, these commitments are no longer just promises. On 20 May 2026, our founder Boris Siegenthaler transferred the majority of Infomaniak’s voting rights to a Swiss public-interest foundation: the Infomaniak Foundation. An irrevocable move, rare in Europe, that places the company beyond the reach of any takeover and sets its DNA in stone. For you, our customers, this means one thing: your cloud will remain Swiss, independent, and true to its values. Forever.

“Technology only makes sense if it improves lives, respects our planet, and strengthens our collective autonomy.”

— Boris Siegenthaler, founder of Infomaniak

Why now?

For a long time, Boris Siegenthaler had a different plan. Each year, he opened up the company’s capital to staff by handing over a portion of his shares. The idea was that the company would gradually become theirs. Thirty-six of them were already shareholders, holding 25% of the capital. A gradual handover, aligned with the company’s values.

But this plan remained fragile. If several employee-shareholders left at the same time, Infomaniak would have to buy back their shares, with financial costs that could become unsustainable. And above all, there was the question of succession: if Boris were to pass away, his heirs, who have no operational knowledge of the company, would have been immediately approached by investors. With a majority of voting rights, you control a company. You can change everything. Undo everything.

We needed an anchor point that no longer depended on a single person. The context made completion urgent: the acceleration of AI, takeovers of European cloud players, the strengthening of extraterritorial legislation, geopolitical tensions. And our responsibility was growing: millions of individuals and hundreds of thousands of businesses and institutions entrust us with their most sensitive data every day. We owe it to them to secure their choice for the long term.

What has concretely changed

The Infomaniak Foundation now holds the majority of voting rights in Infomaniak Group SA, in the form of special shares: a category that gives the Foundation a permanent blocking power and that can never be transferred. Boris Siegenthaler and the 36 employee-shareholders have all unanimously approved this transfer, accepting that the voting rights attached to their shares decrease accordingly. To date, Infomaniak has no external investors.

Concretely, this means that no takeover of the company is possible without the Foundation’s approval. Even if Boris were to pass away, even if an irresistible investor came knocking, control of Infomaniak remains in the hands of a structure dedicated to its mission.

Not a promise. Not an intention. A structure.

The two roles of the Infomaniak Foundation

It’s important to understand that the Infomaniak Foundation has two distinct roles.

A primary public-interest mission

The Infomaniak Foundation is first and foremost a Swiss foundation recognised as serving the public interest, one of the most demanding legal statuses under Swiss law: its statutes are signed before a notary, its public-interest mission is enshrined in its statutes, and it is placed under the ongoing supervision of the cantonal authorities of Geneva.

Its mission: to support independent projects in four areas that extend well beyond Infomaniak’s own scope.

• Digital sovereignty and education
• Ethical technology
• Environment and biodiversity
• Energy transition

This mission builds on initiatives Infomaniak has supported for years, such as DebConf (the international Debian developers’ conference), the 42 Lausanne project (a coding school), and Agent Green (an environmental NGO whose founder Gabriel Paun received the United Nations “Champion of the Earth” award in 2024).

The Foundation is funded by a share of up to 5% of Infomaniak’s annual profit. The more Infomaniak grows, the more projects the Foundation can support.

A role as reference shareholder, guardian of Infomaniak’s commitments

As the reference shareholder of Infomaniak Group SA, the Foundation ensures that the company remains true to its mission. It makes no operational decisions: it is a silent but powerful guardian, intervening only at critical moments in the company’s life.

Its guiding framework is the Shareholding Charter, whose 9 principles are detailed below.

The Foundation Board

Its Board has four volunteer members:

• Marc Maugué, with many years of experience in the foundation sector in French-speaking Switzerland,
• Jonathan Normand, a key figure in governance and positive-impact strategies in Switzerland,
• Claire Siegenthaler, representing the third generation of a family committed to environmental and ethical causes,
• Boris Siegenthaler, founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Infomaniak, who chairs the Board during an initial three-year phase.

The Shareholding Charter: 9 principles set in stone

At the heart of the structure is a founding document signed before a notary: the Shareholding Charter. This Charter defines what the Foundation must defend as Infomaniak’s reference shareholder. It sets out 9 fundamental principles that form the company’s DNA. These principles can be strengthened by the Foundation Board, but never weakened. That is what makes the commitment unshakable.

Each year, Infomaniak will be accountable to the Foundation for upholding these 9 principles, through a public impact report. This is the mechanism that turns commitment into measurable reality.

Strengthened corporate governance

Alongside the creation of the Foundation, the Board of Directors of Infomaniak Group has been strengthened to structure the next stage of its development. Beyond Boris Siegenthaler and Frank Guemara, an Infomaniak director and corporate finance specialist, two independent directors have joined the Board:

• Patricia Solioz Mathys, Vice-Chair of the Board of Directors, with extensive experience leading major Swiss public bodies and industrial services.
• Paul Such, a recognised cybersecurity expert in Switzerland, head of Swiss Post Cybersecurity and founder of several companies.

Two independent committees have also been set up: an Audit and Risk Committee (chaired by Paul Such), which oversees financial soundness and the management of major risks, and a Remuneration Committee (chaired by Patricia Solioz Mathys), which ensures that pay remains aligned with the company’s philosophy. These are the highest governance standards, the kind found in the most solid companies on the market.

The company remains led by its management team: Marc Oehler (CEO), Céline Morey (CFO) and Boris Siegenthaler (CSO), who remains fully engaged in Infomaniak’s strategy.

Why this is unique in Europe

The shareholder-foundation model is not new in Europe. Bosch, Carl Zeiss, Bertelsmann, Rolex, and Victorinox adopted it before us, sometimes more than a century ago.

What makes Infomaniak’s approach distinctive is that to our knowledge, no other European cloud provider has chosen today to place the majority of its voting rights in a public-interest foundation to protect a commitment held since 1994: sovereignty, privacy, the environment, and local roots, all addressed head-on and enshrined in the Foundation’s Shareholding Charter.

In Europe, several cloud providers have ended up in the portfolios of foreign investment funds. Infomaniak, on the other hand, is now majority-owned by a Swiss public-interest foundation, whose primary mission is the public good. It is today a cloud used by millions of users and hundreds of thousands of businesses and institutions across Europe.

“Our independence isn’t a promise. It’s a structure. This foundation is the culmination of thirty years of commitment and guarantees that Infomaniak will continue to serve a form of technology that serves people, respects the planet, and preserves Europe’s autonomy, well beyond the people who make it happen today.”

— Boris Siegenthaler, founder of Infomaniak and Chair of the Infomaniak Foundation

Pioneers of the sovereign Web, with DNA unique in Europe

Infomaniak’s story begins in 1990 with Boris Siegenthaler, in a computing club in Bellevue, run by a group of Geneva enthusiasts. In 1994, the club gave rise to a computer shop in Châtelaine, which assembled and sold PCs for CHF 1,500 when others were charging 3,000. Very quickly, Infomaniak turned to the Internet and offered free access when operators were charging CHF 150 per month, then web hosting for CHF 200 per year when others were charging the same per month. Between 1994 and 1998, more than 40,000 Geneva residents got online thanks to Infomaniak. That was the original idea: to democratise technology.

• Between 1994 and 1998, we made Internet access accessible to all when operators treated it as a luxury product.
• In 2007, we signed our first environmental charter when no one was yet talking about the carbon footprint of technology.
• In 2013, we removed refrigerant-based cooling from our data centres, since cooled solely with filtered outside air, and became a full cloud operator with mastery of OpenStack.
• In 2021, we launched our sovereign Public Cloud, 100% Swiss, at a time when dependence on American hyperscalers was beginning to worry European institutions.
• In 2022, we launched kSuite, a sovereign collaborative alternative to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, well before digital sovereignty became a European political issue.

When Google and Microsoft rewrite their terms and conditions every two years, in response to controversies or new use cases, we have defended the same things from the start: we never resell your data and we don’t use it to train our AI models without your explicit consent. When some offshored their support, outsourced their development, or sold out to investment funds, Infomaniak did the opposite: we design, develop, and operate everything in Switzerland, with 100% of our staff on site.

Environmental commitment, long before it became a topic

This commitment is nothing new. It has shaped our technical choices for nearly twenty years. Our data centres have energy efficiency among the best in the world (a PUE, the industry’s benchmark indicator, among the lowest), and our water consumption is also very low, because we cool our data centres with filtered outside air, without mechanical air conditioning.

We keep our servers for up to 15 years, compared with 3 to 5 years in the rest of the industry. Our electricity is 100% renewable, including 30% that we generate ourselves through our own solar plants equipped with modules entirely manufactured in Europe. And since 2018, we have offset 200% of our carbon emissions (100% since 2007).

Our fourth-generation data centre goes further: it recovers 100% of the electricity it consumes as heat. Located in the basement of an eco-district, it heats 6,000 households in winter and provides daily showers for 20,000 people in summer. All of this is documented in open source at d4project.org, so other players can take inspiration from it.

100% Swiss expertise, with no outsourcing

Our data centres are built, operated, and secured in Switzerland, with no foreign outsourcing. Our cloud platforms and software are designed, developed, and operated by our teams. Our supplier partners are also local wherever possible.

And behind this infrastructure, 100% of our team is in Switzerland, in Geneva and Zurich. Not 200 people in Switzerland and 2,000 in Vietnam. Everyone here. And unlike the web giants that rely on tax engineering, we also pay all our taxes in Switzerland.

For you, this translates into concrete commitments. Your data is in Switzerland, beyond the reach of the Cloud Act (US legislation on data access) and other extraterritorial laws. It is never resold, never exploited, and access to it is strictly controlled. And if you want to leave, you leave the way you came: open formats, documented APIs, no exit fees. We believe we should earn your loyalty, not lock it in.

We go further still: 1% of our annual growth is donated to NGOs such as Agent Green, Amnesty International, Reclaim Finance, Public Eye, Wikimedia, and Kokopelli.

What next? Growing, without betraying ourselves

The Foundation is now the guardian of Infomaniak’s DNA and mission. This structure sets the necessary precondition for any future evolution of the shareholding. From now on, Infomaniak can accelerate its development and bring in, in complete safety, the resources needed for its growth, without ever compromising the commitments made to its customers. Over the coming months, the company will gradually open up part of its capital to investors aligned with its values, in order to develop a sovereign cloud on a European scale, in a context where digital sovereignty is a strategic issue.

No takeover, sale, or change of control can now take place without the Foundation’s approval, which guarantees Infomaniak’s independence and mission over time. Infomaniak can never be sold or diverted from its mission.

Choosing Infomaniak is a strategic choice

From today:

• A protected decision-making structure: the Foundation holds the majority of voting rights in the form of special non-transferable shares, a transfer unanimously approved by all shareholders.
• Our commitments are enshrined in the Foundation’s Shareholding Charter: digital sovereignty, respect for privacy, environmental responsibility, local roots. Any structural change requires the Foundation’s approval, and the Foundation can only strengthen these principles, never weaken them.
• Growing without ever betraying ourselves: Infomaniak can continue to develop, invest, and welcome new shareholders if useful to its mission. The Foundation, as majority shareholder, ensures that the company’s DNA remains preserved across every decision affecting its identity.
• The company remains led by its team: the Foundation makes no operational decisions. The management team continues to run Infomaniak as before.
• Up to 5% of annual profit paid to the Foundation, which will fund independent projects in digital sovereignty, ethical technology, the environment, and the energy transition.

Frequently asked questions (and a message to our customers)

Will my contract, my data, or my services change?

Nothing changes for customers. The governance has evolved, but the team, the services, the prices, and your data all remain strictly the same.

Who runs Infomaniak today?

The same management team: Marc Oehler (CEO), Céline Morey (CFO) and Boris Siegenthaler (CSO). The Foundation makes no operational, commercial, or technical decisions. It acts only as a safeguard over independence and values.

Can the Foundation’s Charter be modified?

Swiss law strictly governs the modification of the statutes of a public-interest foundation: any change requires approval from the cantonal supervisory authorities, can only happen in exceptional cases, and must remain faithful to the founder’s intent. The Shareholding Charter signed before a notary sets out the framework the Foundation must uphold: its principles (sovereignty, privacy, environment, local roots) can be strengthened by the Foundation Board, but never weakened. The structure is designed so that the values can only move forward, never back, even as the people running the company today change.

What if Infomaniak opens up its capital to investors in the future?

That’s the plan: Infomaniak will gradually open up its capital to accelerate the development of a sovereign cloud on a European scale. This opening may take several forms depending on needs and market conditions. Whatever form is chosen, the Foundation retains the majority of voting rights, which guarantees that the company’s DNA, mission, and commitments remain preserved. This is precisely what this structure makes possible: growing, without betraying ourselves.

How is the Foundation funded?

Through a share of up to 5% of Infomaniak’s annual profit.

Where can I find out more?

To you, who have made Infomaniak over the past 32 years

If Infomaniak has been able to maintain its independence all these years, it’s also thanks to you.
To those who joined us at the beginning, when we were just a computing club in Geneva.
To those who are discovering us today and choosing a different, more respectful cloud.
To all the employees who have contributed to building Infomaniak.

This independence is your victory too. Without you, none of this would have been possible. Thank you.