If you zoom out and compare Europe’s homegrown giants to the U.S., the gap is brutal.
The U.S. now has more than ten trillion-dollar companies, led by Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and others. Europe, by contrast, has zero companies above the $1 trillion mark; its largest firms sit in the $300–350 billion range. (Nasdaq) In fact, Europe currently has no company in the global top 25 by market cap.
It’s not because Europe lacks talent or ideas. It’s because European startups are forced to scale inside a legal and bureaucratic maze, while American founders operate on a single legal playing field.
That is exactly what the proposed 28th regime and the EU-INC legal form are trying to fix. And it’s where AI can quietly become Europe’s secret weapon: not just building products, but navigating complexity.
At First AI Movers, this is the edge: using AI systems to process regulations, paperwork, and legal changes at scale, so founders can focus on building rather than surviving spreadsheets, PDFs, and country-by-country rules.
Europe’s Scale Problem: 27 Company Laws, One Global Market
Today, every European founder lives some version of the “Maria (Portuguese) and Jeroen (Dutch)” story:
You choose a country (Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal…).
You incorporate under local law.
You deal with notaries, different languages, and weeks of waiting.
Then investors and employees from other EU countries hesitate, not because of your product, but because of your jurisdiction.
This isn’t anecdotal. Policy documents and VC studies highlight the same issues:
The European Commission has publicly committed to proposing a “28th legal regime” by Q1 2026 to give innovative firms a single harmonised set of rules wherever they operate and invest in the Single Market. (European Parliament)
Cross-border venture capital inside Europe remains low. Between 2007 and 2020, cross-border VC accounted for just 23.1% of VC inflows. (Economy and Finance)
EU-INC’s own advocacy materials note that less than 18% of early-stage investments are pan-European, meaning most funding stays within national silos. (orrick.com)
Result: every EU country is effectively competing alone against the US and China.
The proposed 28th regime aims to flip that. Instead of harmonising 27 national systems (politically impossible in the short term), it creates a voluntary, pan-European corporate form that startups can choose if they want to scale across the EU. (Verfassungsblog)
EU-INC is the community-driven blueprint for how that form should work.
What Is EU-INC and the 28th Regime, in Plain Language?
EU-INC is a proposal for a single, standardized company form that works the same in every EU country:
One digital EU-level registry
One set of corporate rules
One standard investor contract (EU-FAST)
One pan-European employee stock option plan (EU-ESOP)
You register once; your company is recognised everywhere.
The broader 28th regime is the EU’s political umbrella for this concept. It can be described as a way for innovative firms to operate under one set of rules instead of navigating 27 national company laws, insolvency regimes, labour rules, and tax treatments.
Crucially:
It’s optional: founders can pick EU-INC instead of a purely national legal form.
It’s digital-first: an online, API-driven registry, “once-only” data principle, English-first interface.
It doesn’t replace local tax and labour law: those still follow where your people actually work.
In other words:
The 28th regime fixes corporate plumbing and cross-border scaling, not every political disagreement in Europe.
How EU-INC Could Change the Founder Journey
Take the Maria & Jeroen narrative you just read and imagine it with EU-INC in place.
1. Incorporation
Today:
Belgian BV, Polish sp. z o.o, French SAS, Dutch BV… each with different procedures, notaries, fees, languages, and timelines.
Under EU-INC and the 28th regime:
Amy chooses EU-INC and registers via an EU-level online registry.
No notary visits, no paper, no duplicated registrations.
The goal: sub-24-hour incorporation under a standard process, at a cost below €100.
Her company now exists as a pan-European startup legal entity, instantly valid in all 27 member states.
2. Fundraising
Today:
Investors worry about unknown “gotchas” in national company law. They know Delaware C-corps by heart, maybe German or French law, but hesitate on smaller jurisdictions like Belgium or Slovenia.
Under EU-INC:
All early-stage investments can use a standard EU-FAST agreement, designed to be simple, familiar and consistent.
Cross-border investors only need to learn one model once.
Risk of being surprised years later by obscure local rules or tax obligations drops dramatically.
This is how you shift from <18% cross-border early-stage investment to a true European capital market.
3. Talent & Stock Options
Today:
Every country has its own stock option regime. “Dry taxation” (paying tax on options before you can sell them) in places like Belgium makes offers unattractive. If an employee moves from Warsaw to Brussels, their ESOP often breaks.
Under EU-INC and EU-ESOP:
One pan-European ESOP standard.
Common rules on when options vest, when they’re taxed, and when employees actually pay.
Typically, tax kicks in when shares are sold, not when options are granted.
That makes it feasible to:
Hire the best engineer in Lisbon, designer in Tallinn, sales lead in Amsterdam
Move people across borders without re-architecting their compensation every time
And crucially, it gives Europe a counterweight to Silicon Valley’s stock-option-driven talent magnet.
Why AI Matters Here: Bureaucracy Is an Information Problem
Even if EU-INC and the 28th regime are implemented perfectly, the reality is:
Regulations will evolve.
National interpretations will differ at the edges.
Founders will still need to understand how EU-level rules interact with local tax, labour, and sector-specific regulation.
This is where AI stops being a buzzword and becomes infrastructure.
Bureaucracy is, at its core, a massive, messy information processing problem:
Thousands of pages of EU regulations, directives, and delegated acts.
National implementation laws and guidance that change yearly.
Forms, deadlines, reporting standards, and eligibility criteria for grants and incentives.
Large language models and AI agents are extremely good at:
Reading and summarising unstructured legal and policy text
Mapping differences between regimes (e.g., Belgium vs the Netherlands vs Germany)
Triggering reminders and workflows when rules change
The edge for First AI Movers is simple:
Use AI to do the heavy lifting on understanding and monitoring the system, so founders and executives can focus on building the business.
How First AI Movers Thinks About EU-INC, Compliance, and AI
At First AI Movers, the focus is not “AI for AI’s sake.” It is AI as an always-on co-pilot for operating inside Europe’s emerging legal framework.
Concretely, that means designing hyper-personalised AI systems that:
Continuously track EU and national developments
Monitor proposals, impact assessments, and consultations around the 28th regime, EU-INC, stock option frameworks, and AI-related regulation.
Alert you when something relevant to your entity, country, or sector changes.
Translate legal and policy language into operational decisions
“If we switch to EU-INC, how does that change our VC docs, employee equity, and registration footprint?”
“We’re a Dutch AI SaaS company with employees in Spain and Poland. What combination of EU-INC + local rules makes most sense?”
Automate the boring but risky parts
Drafting standard investor documents from the EU-FAST template.
Generating ESOP offer letters aligned with EU-ESOP principles and local labour/tax constraints.
Creating compliance checklists and calendar reminders around filings, board approvals, and shareholder actions.
Keep founders and executives “ambiently aware”
Not firehosing you with every policy tweet.
But surfacing:
What changed
Why it matters
What you should do (or not do) this quarter
The goal is not to replace lawyers or tax advisors. It is to make their work targeted and efficient, while giving founders a live map of the regulatory landscape.
How to Prepare Your Company for the 28th Regime (With AI Help)
Whether or not EU-INC becomes the dominant standard, the trend is clear: Europe is moving toward more integrated startup rules, and early movers will have an advantage.
Here’s how to prepare:
1. Map Your Current Legal Footprint
Where are you incorporated?
Where do you actually operate (offices, remote employees, customers)?
Which jurisdictions already create friction for fundraising, hiring, or ESOPs?
AI can help you build a single, living inventory of entities, contracts, and obligations.
2. Simulate “What If We Were EU-INC?”
With an AI system wired into up-to-date policy sources, you can simulate scenarios:
“If we were EU-INC instead of a national BV/SAS/GmbH, what would change for:
investor onboarding
future fundraising rounds
employee stock options
cross-border expansion?”
This lets you prepare for the 28th regime before it formally launches.
3. Standardise What You Can Today
Even before EU-FAST and EU-ESOP are law, you can:
Move towards standardised terms in SAFEs / convertibles.
Harmonise your ESOP logic across countries as much as local regimes allow.
Use AI to keep all versions, templates, and local variations consistent.
When a pan-European standard lands, you’re ready to migrate with fewer surprises.
4. Build Your “Awareness Infrastructure”
Instead of reacting to each new law in panic mode, treat regulatory awareness like you treat security or uptime:
Monitored continuously
Surfaced in dashboards, not PDFs hidden in email
Supported by AI agents that scan, summarise, and route issues to the right humans
That’s the kind of system First AI Movers builds: quietly running in the background so you never get blindsided by a regulatory change that affects your funding, hiring, or operations.
The Bigger Picture: Legal Rails + AI Intelligence = European Scale
EU-INC and the 28th regime will not magically create trillion-dollar European companies. They also won’t erase all national frictions overnight.
But they do promise three transformative changes:
A single, credible legal chassis for European startups to scale on
A structural boost for cross-border capital and talent flows
A clear standard around which tools, advisors, and AI systems can be built
Once that standard exists, AI stops being just an “innovation topic” and becomes infrastructure for navigating Europe as one market:
Founders can incorporate, fundraise, and hire across borders with far less friction.
AI agents can encode and maintain the complexity so humans don’t have to.
Systems like those we build at First AI Movers can keep you compliant, informed, and strategically ahead, instead of eternally catching up.
If Europe wants its own trillion-dollar champions, it needs both:
Better rails (EU-INC, 28th regime), and
Better intelligence (AI systems that help you live on those rails without losing your mind).
That’s the future we’re building toward:
A Europe where legal scale and AI literacy are givens, and founders can finally compete as Europe rather than as 27 fragmented markets.
Dr. Hernani Costa
Founder & CEO of First AI Movers
Open Tabs
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