Sovereign Tech Agency


The Sovereign Tech Agency is a subsidiary of the German Federal Agency for Breakthrough Innovation, funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, aimed at providing financial support to open-source software. The initial funds were allocated by the Bundestag in May 2022.

Purpose of funding

According to the federal budget of Germany plan, the program aims to promote and secure open-source foundational technologies. It intends to make the open-source ecosystem more resilient against external attacks, thereby enhancing cybersecurity and resilience across the German economy. This initiative fulfills a demand from the coalition government. This is also an approach to the classic free-rider problem faced by many open source projects.
The funding is described as time-limited and targeted at specific challenges or security vulnerabilities.

Scope and organization

In 2022, the program had a budget of 13 million euros, which increased to approximately 22 million euros in 2023 and was expected to reach up to 16 million euros in 2024. The executive team consists of:
  • Adriana Groh, previously from the Open Knowledge Foundation's Prototype Fund
  • Luisa von Beust, previously at several commercial organizations
  • Fiona Krakenbürger, previously worked at the Open Technology Fund

    Supported projects

As of April 2025, the following projects received funding:
  • ActivityPub testsuite: €152,000
  • Arch Linux Package Management : €562,800
  • coreutils: €99,060
  • cURL: €195,500
  • domain: €993,600
  • Drupal: €278,700
  • The Eclipse Foundation: €515,200
  • FFmpeg: €157,580
  • Fortran ecosystem : €816.000 €182,930
  • FreeBSD: €686,400
  • GNOME: 1 million €
  • GNU libmicrohttpd: €300,000
  • GopenPGP/OpenPGP.js: €176,955
  • GStreamer: €203,000
  • JavaScript ecosystem : €176,955
  • JUnit: €180,000
  • Log4j: €596,160
  • Mamba: €349,875
  • OpenBGPd: €200,000
  • OpenBLAS: €263,000
  • OpenJS : €874,940
  • OpenStreetMap: €384,000
  • OpenMLS: €195,000
  • OpenSSH: €200,000
  • Pendulum: €449,850
  • PHP: €205,000
  • Prossimo, part of Internet Security Research Group, to support projects including Rustls: €1,436,729
  • Python Package Index: €1,056,672
  • Reproducible builds: €353,430
  • RubyGems & Bundler: €668,400
  • Samba: €688,800
  • Sequoia PGP: €900,000
  • systemd: €455,000
  • WireGuard: €209,000
  • Yocto Project: €759,000