European brand, foreign owner

6 documented cases. Each case names the brand, the controlling owner, and one public source. Undocumented suspicions are not published here.

A European front door does not prove European control. These cases are documented in public sources, with one source line each. Cases we could not document stay off this page and sit in the Unverified list instead.

Startpage and StartMail

Startpage is operated by Surfboard Holding BV of The Hague, Netherlands, and serves Google and Bing results through a privacy proxy. Its parent is System1, a publicly traded advertising company based in the United States, which took a majority stake in 2019. Basis: Startpage support pages state the company is headquartered in the Netherlands and part of System1 of the United States; Wikipedia records Surfboard Holding BV as owner and System1 as parent. Source: Startpage Support and Wikipedia, checked 2026-10-26.

ONLYOFFICE

The operating company, Ascensio System SIA, is registered in Riga, Latvia, and says its intellectual property has always been held there. Its own about page also states that the holding company, ONLYOFFICE Capital Group Pte. Ltd., is registered in Singapore. That is not US control, but it is not a purely Latvian structure either, so the directory prints both layers. Source: ONLYOFFICE official about and contacts pages, checked 2026-10-26.

Ecosia and Qwant: the EUSP joint venture

This case is the opposite pattern. Ecosia of Germany and Qwant of France formed European Search Perspective (EUSP), a 50/50 joint venture, to build a European search index called Staan. The index began serving part of French and German queries in 2025. Both engines still mix in results and ads from Google and Bing for coverage, which their own blog posts state openly. European control, partial US dependence at the results layer. Source: Ecosia official blog posts on EUSP, checked 2026-10-26.

Jitsi Meet (public instance)

Jitsi is open-source software that anyone can host in Europe. The default public instance at meet.jit.si is run by 8x8 Inc. of the United States. Same software, two different jurisdictions, decided only by which instance you open. Source: Jitsi project documentation and 8x8 company pages, checked 2026-10-26.

Bitwarden EU hosting

Bitwarden is a US company that offers an EU cloud region. The region changes where vault data is stored. It does not change the controlling jurisdiction, because the operator remains a US company under the CLOUD Act. The directory lists Bitwarden as a comparison entry for exactly this reason. Source: Bitwarden official documentation on EU hosting, checked 2026-10-26.

Hugging Face

Hugging Face was founded by a French team and is incorporated as Hugging Face, Inc. in the United States, headquartered in New York, with the Hub hosted on AWS in the United States. French roots, US control. Re-checked 2026-10-26 against current company profiles and closed as a verified comparison entry.