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Oct 1, 2026 · 13 min read
by Purpose Foundation
In the age of AI, economies, nations, societies are becoming increasingly dependent on digital technologies. Corporations like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Anthropic dominate markets, and it is not only in Europe that concerns are voiced about excessive dependence on American tech companies. Because whoever controls the data holds power: economically, politically, and socially.
That is why we were delighted a few months ago to hear that Infomaniak, a Swiss cloud provider of considerable size, had transferred the majority of its voting rights to a foundation, thereby establishing a structure with steward ownership elements and helping to strengthen the digital sovereignty of Switzerland and Europe.
Now, the next chapter has begun: In order to gain more flexible access to capital in the future, thereby making it easier, for instance, to build environmentally sustainable data centers and establish a strong, data-sovereign European alternative to American solutions, the company has gone public today, on October 1st. No new capital is being raised with the listing itself, but it opens the door to future capital increases (see “open questions” below).
This marks a good opportunity for us to take a look at Infomaniak’s ownership structure – and what the listing means for it. We know from Danish pioneers that steward ownership and a stock market listing are not mutually exclusive (see our case study on Novo Nordisk). But does this also apply in Infomaniak’s case?
Before we start, let’s make our stance clear: We consider Infomaniak an amazing case that shows the potential and relevance of alternative ownership structures. The company has taken important steps to establish a structure that is suitable for their company and vision. What we would like to contribute to the debate, is a first closer look through the steward ownership lens: where the company and its plans currently stand, what that means from a steward ownership perspective, and what remains uncertain.
Infomaniak is a Swiss cloud provider based in Geneva, founded by Boris Siegenthaler and positioned as an independent, “ethical” alternative to the big tech clouds. For more than thirty years, the company has grown without access to outside equity capital and, since 2017, by reinvesting all of its profits – a principle that also sits at the core of steward ownership and that many family-owned businesses share.
In May 2026, founder Boris Siegenthaler placed the majority of the voting rights in a public interest foundation, which we and others shared at the time as a steward ownership story. On their website, Infomaniak describes its new structure, saying: “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.” On an ownership level, this is depicted on the company’s webpage as follows:
Now, Infomaniak has taken the next step: a listing on the SIX Swiss Exchange. Meaning: As of today, shares in the company are being traded on the Swiss Stock Exchange. The transition to a publicly traded company was made possible by what is known as a reverse takeover – specifically, the takeover of Infomaniak by the Perrot Duval Holding SA, a Swiss industrial holding company that had been publicly traded since 1905. Perrot Duval sold its operating business to its own management and contributed around CHF 6 million in cash to the new company, leaving a listed shell that was renamed Infomaniak SA. Perrot Duval's shareholders approved the deal on September 24. According to SIX, Infomaniak is the first certified B Corp to be listed on the Swiss stock exchange.
The listed company has two share classes: A-shares and B-shares. Both classes carry exactly one voting right per share (= the classic “one share, one vote” principle); however, Class A shares have only one-tenth of the par value. According to the company’s listing prospectus, the total number of A-shares is 8,050,226; the total number of B-shares is 4,670,103. This leads to the following distribution of rights:
A-shares: majority voting rights (63.3%), a small share of the economic rights (14.7%). These are held exclusively by the Infomaniak Foundation and are not listed and not freely transferable.
B-shares: 36.7% of voting rights, 85.3% of economic rights. These are listed and publicly tradable.
This distribution is roughly the same as the one Infomaniak established when it transferred control to the foundation (with 65% of the voting rights, see chart above). The slight difference stems from the fact that the remaining Perrot Duval shareholders still hold approximately 5.8% of the B-shares and, consequently, a small number of voting rights.
The foundation, equipped with a majority of the voting rights, still acts as guardian of the structure and the company’s mission and values, bound by a notarised Charter of Shareholdings with nine principles, including independence, digital sovereignty, privacy and environmental responsibility, which can “be strengthened by the Foundation Board, but never weakened”, as Infomaniak puts it. The foundation itself is financed through up to 5% of the company’s profits.
Steward ownership rests on two core principles:
1. Control over the company cannot be sold for speculative reasons and stays with people who are connected to the company and its purpose.
2. Profits serve the company’s purpose rather than being extracted for private wealth.
When looking at Infomaniak through that lens, there is a lot here that resonates. Control rights are largely decoupled from profit rights: the majority of the votes lies with a public interest foundation that holds only a small share of the economic rights. Thus, the majority of the voting shares cannot be freely traded, and the company’s purpose and independence are protected in the foundation’s charter. According to the foundation's statutes, any sale of its shares requires the unanimous approval of the Foundation Board:
“The participations and securities held by the Foundation may not be transferred, pledged or otherwise alienated, in whole or in part, directly or indirectly, except with the unanimous consent of all members of the Foundation Council.”
Moreover, the board is bound by the Shareholding Charter of the foundation, whose first principle commits it to the company's independence:
“I. Independence: To ensure the means to remain faithful to the company's mission and values over the long term, by subordinating profit to the project's longevity and intended impact, in order to build, invest, and decide freely in the interest of future generations and the living world.”
A sale of control would be hard to reconcile with this principle, although the Charter does not explicitly prohibit it.
Also when it comes to the principle of purpose orientation and profit distribution, the structure looks strong: dividends are effectively decided by the foundation through its voting majority, and the foundation’s Shareholding Charter requires profits to go first to research, development and infrastructure before rewarding shareholders.
Structurally, this is not far from the Danish industrial foundation model, and it is genuinely encouraging to see a company of this size establish an alternative ownership form while going public.
One difference, however, is that in Danish models such as Carlsberg or Novo Nordisk, the foundation's control is a little more firmly enshrined in its statutes. At Carlsberg, a minimum quota is specified in the foundation's statutes: The foundation must hold at least 51% of the votes. Infomaniak’s foundation lacks a comparable rule. And Novo Nordisk's foundation may only give up control with the consent of the Danish foundation authority. At Infomaniak, a unanimous decision by the four-member Foundation Board is apparently sufficient to sell A-shares. The Geneva supervisory authority oversees whether the foundation's assets are used in line with its purpose, but since that purpose is defined as public benefit funding rather than holding the company, it is unclear whether this would prevent a sale. The Novo Nordisk and Carlsberg foundations, by contrast, are explicitly designed to provide a stable basis for their companies, supported by a foundation law tailored specifically to such enterprise foundations.
A stock market listing might at first seem at odds with steward ownership. But the two are not mutually exclusive, as the Danish examples showcase: Also companies like Novo Nordisk and Carlsberg are publicly listed, while a foundation holds the controlling majority of the votes. Often this works through a dual share class structure similar to Infomaniak’s: investors can buy into the company’s economic value (and minority voting rights), while control stays with the foundation and the company cannot be taken over. So the listing itself is not what raises questions for us. What matters is how control and profit rights are distributed around it.
Our open questions are mostly about governance details:
According to the listing prospectus, the foundation will hold all A-shares after the listing. These are neither listed nor freely transferable and represent 63.3% of the voting rights. Before the listing, the foundation held 65% of the votes and around 15% of the company's economic rights, while the founder and 36 employee shareholders held the remaining votes and most of the economic rights. Since the listing takes the form of a reverse takeover of Perrot Duval, their shares are exchanged for newly issued, publicly traded B-shares, alongside the roughly 5.8% held by Perrot Duval's existing shareholders.
As far as we know, B-share-holdings are not capped, although Infomaniak’s founder Boris Siegenthaler agreed to keep at least 80% of his shares for one year. As he holds around 3.3 million of the B-shares, he holds around 70% of all B-shares and thus 25.9% of all votes, as well as around 60% of the company's economic rights. The rest of the B-shares lies with other Infomaniak employees, former Perrot Duval shareholders and some of the company’s board members.
So initially, the vast majority of the remaining votes will lie with people who also have economic interests in the company. At the same time, founder Boris Siegenthaler, who holds economic rights himself, chairs the four-member volunteer Foundation Board for an initial phase of three years and also sits on the company's board of directors. He will most likely play a significant role, both through his formal power and through the soft power of being the founder and an influential figure in the company. None of this has to be a problem, given how this team has acted for three decades, but structurally it is worth naming.
And of course, founder compensation is, from a steward ownership lens, completely legitimate. Founders take on huge risk, and in many steward-owned companies, they keep profit rights. These are usually designed so that they do not interfere with steward ownership principles, for example through caps on profit rights or governance safeguards, for example supermajority requirements that prevent people with economic interests from deciding on profit distribution among themselves.
So, some open questions from the steward ownership lens are:
The foundation currently holds slightly less than two thirds of the votes. As we understand Swiss corporate law, certain key decisions require not only two thirds of the votes represented, but also a majority of the par value represented. Since in the Infomaniak case, the founder holds around 60% of the capital, the foundation cannot pass such decisions without his support. So could this, combined with his role as president of the Foundation Board, member of the company's board of directors and Chief Strategy Officer, undermine the principles of steward ownership?
Moreover, the foundation's share of votes could be diluted in the future, for example if new B-shares were issued to raise capital. According to the prospectus, the company’s board of directors is authorized to issue up to 1,642,540 new B-shares until 2031, which would reduce the foundation's share of the votes to around 56%. Any further issuance would require a resolution of the general meeting, where the foundation holds the majority.
Resulting from the points above: Can governance mechanisms mitigate these potential effects? The foundation's statutes do contain some safeguards: board members serve largely pro bono (capped at CHF 10,000 per year), must recuse themselves in case of conflicts of interest and are subject to an age limit of 65. However, one of the four seats is reserved for a descendant of the founder, and the president has the casting vote in a tie. In a small board, this gives the founding family considerable weight. At the same time, the two other members, Marc Maugué of the Hans Wilsdorf Foundation and Jonathan Normand of B Lab Switzerland, bring independent governance expertise. How these checks and balances play out in practice will be key.
According to Infomaniak, the foundation does not take operational decisions (which is common also in the large Danish foundation models) but acts primarily as a guardian: it elects the board of directors, must consent to any change of control (see here) and monitors the foundation’s Shareholding Charter through an annual impact report (see here). The management team including the founder is in operational control. It would be good to understand better how close the foundation is to operations and how stewardship will be brought to life in practice.
Some of this we cannot yet assess, in particular how the governance will work in practice. Effective mechanisms here could certainly address the questions above.
Infomaniak already has many elements of steward ownership and can possibly become a strong example of it. By placing control over his company in a foundation to protect the company's independence and mission for the long term, the founder and his team have taken an important step: “Not a promise. Not an intention. A structure.” And given the founder's track record, the current concentration of roles and economic rights is not a concern in itself, especially as this is likely to decrease over time: Boris Siegenthaler’s role as the foundation’s board chair is initially set for three years, plus he already intends to sell part of his shares. From a structural perspective, a steward ownership model is most robust once governance and stewardship fully come to life independently of individual people.
We want to be clear that this is not a judgment of whether Infomaniak’s structure is good or right. Our view is that every company should find the ownership solution that fits its own situation, values and history. And our role is to look at developments like this through the lens of steward ownership, to create transparency and to share knowledge about what the concept means in practice. And that’s the perspective we’re offering here.
What is your take on the structure? Did we miss important points? Do you have insights into how the governance works in practice? Be in touch!
Balancing a public listing with long-term independence is certainly a challenge. But it is also a huge opportunity, not only for a self-determined company, but also for Switzerland’s and also for Europe's sovereignty over its own digital infrastructure.
