HostYourAI raises first funding for sovereign AI hosting platform in Europe
HostYourAI has raised its first external capital in an early-stage funding round led by Volta Ventures. The Groningen-based company is building a hosting platform that lets organisations use AI models entirely within European jurisdiction. HostYourAI will use the investment to further develop the platform and grow across Europe.
Companies that use AI want to decide for themselves where their models run and what happens to their data. HostYourAI offers a hosting solution that lets customers deploy open models and their own customised models in their products and applications, and as support for programming. The company takes care of installation, the required computing power and day-to-day operations. Customers keep control over their models and data without having to maintain the infrastructure themselves. HostYourAI now hosts models for organisations and developers across Europe.
Jantine Doornbos, founder and CEO of HostYourAI: "I want to build the AI hosting platform of Europe, because I believe that for something as important as AI we shouldn't be this dependent on American technology companies. Organisations should be able to decide for themselves which models they use, where those models are hosted and what happens to their data. That is what people mean by sovereign AI. To get there, we need to build the knowledge and infrastructure here to train, host and use models ourselves. With HostYourAI we make that accessible, so companies can get started without having to organise everything on their own.
Frank Maene, partner at Volta Ventures: "Everyone talks about sovereign AI, but HostYourAI is one of the few that delivers the full stack itself, from GPU to application. On top of that, we are very impressed by Jantine's entrepreneurship and drive."
On its own hosting platform, HostYourAI is also developing Loes, a Dutch AI assistant based on open models that have been further trained on Dutch-language data. By building and running an AI assistant itself, the team gains hands-on experience that also feeds back into improving the hosting platform. Loes has been covered by, among others, Het Financieele Dagblad, BNR and Dagblad van het Noorden.
The investment will be used to expand the team, further develop the hosting platform and the service for programming with AI, and drive commercial growth across Europe.
About Volta Ventures Volta Ventures is a pre-seed and seed venture capital fund focused on ambitious B2B software and SaaS founders in the Benelux. Offices in Amsterdam, Ghent and Antwerp.