Aakash Gupta@aakashgupta
Europe already tried this. It was called the Societas Europaea. Launched 2004. Same pitch: one company structure, all of Europe.
Twenty-one years later: roughly 4,000 total registrations. 79% in the Czech Republic. Most were shell companies. The minimum capital requirement was €120,000. Formation was complex. And the “European” company still operated under 27 different national legal systems for labor, tax, and insolvency. Then the EU tried the European Private Company in 2010 and the Single-Member Company in 2014. Both died during negotiations before they ever launched.
EU Inc. is a genuine upgrade. €100 to register. 48 hours. No capital floor. Digital from day one. 22,000 founders including the Stripe co-founders backed the campaign. The Commission projects 300,000 new companies in its first decade.
But registration was never why European founders do the “Delaware flip.”
They flip because US venture capital is 3x the size of Europe’s entire continent. Because most American VCs require Delaware C-corps. Because expanding from Germany to Spain still means different employment law, different stock option taxation, different insolvency rules. Because 1.4 million entities are incorporated in Delaware, including two-thirds of the Fortune 500, and every lawyer and investor on the planet speaks Delaware law fluently.
This meme has described Europe’s role in tech for a decade. EU Inc. is the first serious attempt to change the punchline.
The question is whether 27 member states actually let it. If EU Inc. ships as a regulation, one set of rules applied identically everywhere, it changes the game. If it gets diluted into a directive that lets each country write their own version, it dies exactly the way the Societas Europaea did. Labor law and co-determination disputes alone paralyzed the SE for three decades.
Easier registration with fragmented capital markets is a faster on-ramp to the same traffic jam.
