Infomaniak becomes a foundation: what it means for Helvetra

On 20 May 2026, an email landed in the inbox we use to run Helvetra. It was from Boris Siegenthaler, founder of Infomaniak, the Swiss company that hosts everything we run. The subject was, in effect, that he no longer controls his own company, and that this was good news.

A week earlier, on 13 May, he had transferred majority voting rights to a new Swiss public-interest body, the Infomaniak Foundation, in the form of special shares that can never be sold or transferred. We are a customer, not an insider, so we read it the way any customer would. The question underneath it is the one that matters to us: does the ground we built on stay the way it is.

Most companies pick a host for a website and move on. For Helvetra the host is closer to the whole product, because every layer runs on the same Swiss company.

The website you are reading is served from an Infomaniak server in Switzerland. The backend that handles a translation request, and the database and cache behind it, run on the same infrastructure. And Apertus, the Swiss open model that does the actual translating, runs on Infomaniak's AI infrastructure. The text you type to translate does not leave the country, and it never passes through a company answerable to a foreign court. That is the entire promise of Helvetra, and it is only true because the layer underneath holds it up.

We chose Infomaniak for the things that line up with what Helvetra is for:

• Swiss law, not just Swiss soil. A US hyperscaler can put a datacenter in Zurich too, so "the data sits in Switzerland" is the easy part. What a US company cannot change is its own jurisdiction: it stays reachable under the US Cloud Act wherever the servers physically are. Infomaniak answers to Swiss law, full stop. And choosing it means putting money into a Swiss solution, rather than the local outpost of a foreign giant.
• An environmental record that is measured, not branded. Infomaniak runs on renewable electricity, keeps servers in service far longer than the industry's usual three to five years, and has offset more carbon than it emits for years. The figures are in a public impact report it commits to publishing annually.
• Thirty years of local roots in Geneva, rather than a reseller fronting someone else's cloud.

Running a language model is energy-hungry by nature, and picking the greenest host in the country does not make AI translation free of impact. It means the power is renewable and the hardware stays in service for years instead of months. That is the honest best case, not a clean conscience.

And on the model itself: we use Apertus as Infomaniak serves it. We cannot currently tune it to translate better, the way the canton of Ticino fine-tuned Apertus 8B to 94 percent on its own translation task. When Apertus improves, our translations improve with it. Until then, we ship what the base model gives us.

Here is what the letter was really about. Until this month, the commitments above rested on one person's word. Boris owned Infomaniak and could keep it pointed where he wanted. The flip side is that a future owner, or a future Boris under pressure, could point it somewhere else.

The foundation removes that. The principles we relied on, sovereignty, privacy, environmental responsibility, local roots, are now written into a notarized charter that the foundation exists to defend, and that can only be strengthened, never weakened. The special shares carry the votes and cannot be sold, so no investor, present or future, can buy Infomaniak and quietly change what it stands for.

"No investor, present or future, will be able to alter Infomaniak's DNA, mission, or independence."

Boris Siegenthaler, in the letter to customers

Boris is precise about his own role, and so are we: he has given up voting control, not walked away. He chairs the foundation's board, and the team that has run Infomaniak for years still runs it. What changed is not who is in the room, but what can no longer be undone from outside it.

Nothing about Helvetra changes today. The point is the opposite: nothing about the ground under Helvetra can quietly change tomorrow. The Swiss promise we make to you is now backed, all the way down to the server and the model, by a company whose own Swiss promise is locked into its governance.

And you do not have to take our word, or Boris's. The charter is a public document, and the impact report is published every year. We think infrastructure should be checkable rather than taken on faith, which is also why all of Helvetra's own code is on GitHub. This is the third piece of the same story we have been telling: a Swiss model (Apertus), an open-source product (Helvetra), and now a Swiss host whose independence is structural. Same bet, three layers down.

• The foundation, in full: Infomaniak Foundation and the sovereign cloud
• The Shareholding Charter (PDF): fondation-infomaniak.ch
• Infomaniak's public impact report: infomaniak.com/en/impact-report
• The model we run on it: Apertus at Uphill Conf 2026
• Why we open-sourced everything: Helvetra at Swiss Startup Days 2026