EU Inc and the 28th Regime: What a Pan-European Company Would Mean for Estonia

Europe has 27 member states and 27 different ways to start a company. A startup registered in Tallinn that wants to raise from Berlin and hire in Madrid runs into three legal systems, each with its own company law, its own register, its own notary requirements and its own tax treatment of stock options. That is the problem EU Inc set out to fix.

It began as a grassroots campaign and has gathered more than 26,000 supporters across 27 countries — founders, investors and operators. Backers include Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström, Julian Teicke of wefox and Daniel Khachab of Choco, along with partners from Seedcamp, Accel, Index Ventures, EQT and Balderton. The legal groundwork was done with law firm Dentons and experts across Europe.

And unlike most petitions, it worked.

Where Things Actually Stand

On 18 March 2026, the European Commission published its proposed regulation creating the 28th regime — the EU Inc legal form. On 19 March the European Council endorsed it as a priority measure for 2026 and called on the co-legislators to adopt it by the end of the year.

One design choice matters more than any other: EU Inc replaces nothing. It is voluntary, sitting alongside existing national forms. An Estonian OÜ stays an OÜ. A company may opt into EU Inc, but nobody has to.

The promise is digital incorporation in a form recognized across the union, targeting 48 hours and no minimum capital requirement. The campaign's own five demands are sharper: free choice of registration seat, a central digital registry, access regardless of company size, a common stock-option framework with tax deferral, and taxes and employment law staying where the real activity happens.

The file is now in the European Parliament and the Council simultaneously. In Parliament, it sits with the JURI committee under rapporteur René Repasi, with a committee vote expected in September and a plenary vote in October. In the Council, negotiations are chaired by the Irish presidency, which began on 1 July. The target for trilogue agreement is the end of 2026, which would put the form into service in early 2027.

Accurate as of 21 July 2026. This file is moving quickly.

Why Estonia Has More at Stake Than Most

For most member states, EU Inc is an abstract argument about harmonizing company law. For Estonia, it is something else, because Estonia is the one country that already proved the model works.

The e-Residency program has issued more than 134,000 e-resident IDs, and over 39,000 companies have been founded through it. In 2025 alone, e-residents established 5,556 new companies, 15% more than the year before, with an economic contribution of €124.9 million. The top three countries for new e-residents were Germany, France and Ukraine.

Estonia, in other words, is already the closest thing the EU has to what EU Inc promises. It solved remote incorporation at the national level a decade ago, and thousands of Europeans use it every year.

That makes one contested point the decisive one for Estonia. The campaign warns that free choice of registration seat — the right to register where you choose, independent of where you operate — is under pressure. That single clause determines whether EU Inc turns member states into genuine competitors for incorporations, the way Delaware competes in the United States.

If free choice survives, Estonia gets to compete on exactly what it is best at: fast, digital, inexpensive incorporation. If it is stripped out and the registration seat is tied to the place of activity, the advantage Estonia spent ten years building quietly disappears. The same regulation can either amplify Estonia's position or neutralize it, and the difference is one provision.

What the Register Already Shows

Cross-border business is not a hypothetical in the Estonian register. It is already in the data.

Our foreign founders view shows at least 4,648 Estonian companies with foreign citizens among their founders, spread across 61 countries with five or more companies each. Between them, they paid €46.3 million in taxes over the last year. Among EU countries, Germany leads with 218 companies, followed by Finland with 194, Spain 130, Italy 121, Latvia 103, Poland 88 and France 64.

"At least" is doing real work in that sentence. We count founders whose citizenship we can resolve from register data, and some foreign founders cannot be resolved at all, so the true figure is higher. We have written before about how Estonian company data becomes public and why some gaps are unavoidable.

Ownership is the other half. Our foreign-ownership view links 648 Estonian companies to corporate owners abroad, most often in Latvia (246), Germany (164), Norway (127) and Finland (95). Those figures cover only the six national registers we have integrated directly. We described that work in more detail when we joined forces with OpenCorporates.

Estonian business is already pan-European. EU Inc would not create that reality; it would give it a single legal form.

The Question Nobody Is Asking: What Happens to Transparency

Law firms have published dozens of analyses of this proposal. Almost none address the question that matters most from a company-register point of view.

The Estonian business register is unusually open. Board members, shareholders, annual reports and activity codes are public and machine-readable. nimistu exists only because of that. You can run a background check on any Estonian company because the state made the data genuinely public.

If EU Inc creates a central digital registry, the obvious question is what openness standard it will meet. Will the people behind an EU Inc be as visible as those behind an OÜ? Will the data be machine-readable and reusable, or one lookup at a time behind a captcha? Will it link to national registers so that cross-border ownership chains stay traceable?

These are not technical details. Checking a counterparty before signing, journalists tracing ownership, and anti-money-laundering work all depend on company data being properly public. A new pan-European form with weaker transparency than Estonia offers today would be a step backward, even if incorporation gets easier.

Our position is straightforward: the 28th regime is a good idea and deserves support. But an open register should be part of it, not an afterthought.

What to Watch

• September 2026: JURI committee vote in the European Parliament
• October 2026: plenary vote
• End of 2026: target for trilogue agreement
• Early 2027: earliest point the form could actually be usable
• Throughout: whether free choice of registration seat survives the text

Nothing changes for Estonian companies in the coming months. An OÜ stays an OÜ and e-Residency keeps working. But if EU Inc lands the way its campaigners want, 2027 changes what it means to be a European company — and Estonia has more riding on that conversation than most.

The initiative's own materials and full list of demands are at eu-inc.org.