The Sovereignty Play: Inside Søren Laustrup’s Bet on AI-Native Cybersecurity

How a three-time cybersecurity founder is building Europe’s answer to alert fatigue — and betting that “sovereign” security will define the next decade of European enterprise.

Søren Laustrup is not new to this. He exited his first company, a knowledge management systems business, in 2000. He then spent roughly twenty years building Logpoint — bootstrapped for the first fifteen, before raising in 2017 and 2020, and eventually exiting the company in 2022/23. After that, he became an angel investor, backing six companies, two or three of which have already exited.

Eighteen months ago, he started again — this time with Sovera Security, an AI-native, sovereign MDR (Managed Detection and Response) provider based in Copenhagen. StartupReporter.eu caught up with him to talk about the problem he’s solving, why he chose to stay independent of venture capital, and what it will take for Europe to stop losing its best companies to American cap tables.

The problem: too many tools, too many alerts, not enough humans

Cybersecurity has a sprawl problem. Over the past two decades, every new attack surface — endpoints, networks, identity, cloud — has spawned its own category of tool: EDR, NDR, IAM, SIEM, SOAR. Each one generates alerts. None of them talks to each other particularly well.

“Nobody can manage that,” Laustrup says. “If you have a larger midsize or even a large enterprise, you simply don’t have the people with the expertise to manage all of these alerts.” Worse, he explains, modern attackers don’t respect the boundaries between tools — they move fluidly from browser to network to application to cloud, while security teams are left staring at disconnected, siloed signals from a patchwork of vendors.

That fragmentation is the problem Sovera was built to solve — not by adding another layer on top of the stack, but by ingesting signals from whatever tools a company already has, regardless of vendor, and applying AI natively to make sense of them.

“We are AI native from the very ground up,” Laustrup says. “We are not another tool laying on top of what we already have.” When Sovera’s AI agents hit a question they can’t resolve on their own, they escalate to a human — rather than the more common model of humans using AI as a supporting tool, Sovera flips it: AI does the primary analysis, and people are the safety net.

Who Sovera is built for

Sovera’s ideal client, in Laustrup’s words, already has some security maturity to build on: at least one or two established tools in place — a SIEM or an EDR, for instance — operating in a regulated environment or handling critical data, with 200 or more employees. “Whether it’s governmental or it’s private, it doesn’t really matter,” he says. It’s a deliberate scope: Sovera isn’t trying to be a first security purchase, but the layer that finally makes a company’s existing tools work together.

The sovereignty angle: why “where the data sits” isn’t the whole story

Sovera’s clearest differentiator is baked into its name. The company positions itself as Europe’s sovereign alternative to US-dominated security infrastructure — but Laustrup is quick to point out that sovereignty is a deeper commitment than it sounds.

“It’s not only where data reside, but it’s also where data are processed and looked at,” he says. Sovera runs its models in its own Danish data centre, with no ability to “reach out to a mothership somewhere.” Its SOC and MDR analysts are Danish citizens working around the clock in Denmark. And because the models are tightly scoped and guardrailed, Laustrup argues Sovera sidesteps the risks that come with more open-ended AI deployments: “They cannot break out — they’re super hard harnessed and guardrailed in what they can do.”

For companies in regulated industries or holding critical infrastructure, that combination — data locality, human locality, and model containment — is becoming less of a nice-to-have and more of a procurement requirement, a shift reflected in Sovera’s early traction: 30 clients and roughly 30 employees within its first year and a half.

Beyond incident history: building for continuous improvement

Ask Laustrup what most MDR reporting gets wrong, and he doesn’t hesitate: it’s obsessed with the past. “What most people are looking at… it’s all about the history. What was the MTTR, how many alerts, how much this and that? To me, that’s just like yesterday’s news.”

Instead, Sovera positions itself around continuous improvement — proactively profiling a client’s infrastructure, identifying blind spots, and prioritising what to fix next, weighted by actual business criticality rather than a generic severity score. “If this system is hacked and is taken offline, or you cannot reach it anymore — does it mean nothing, or does it mean the world to the company?” That question, Laustrup says, is where the real value conversation with clients happens.

Building without VCs: staying in control on purpose

Unlike many founders in his position, Laustrup chose not to raise from venture capital. A small group of trusted private investors, alongside non-dilutive debt financing, gave him full ownership of Sovera’s cap table — a deliberate decision shaped by three decades of watching how outside capital changes a company’s incentives.

“You need to understand that even though [investors] don’t have the majority of the shares, they are there for the money and nothing else — not because they like you,” he says. He’s candid about the trade-offs: VCs push founders to burn cash and grow fast; private equity firms, he says, often position themselves as the “last investor,” which can leave founders with painfully little leverage if they run short on cash. “The money will, out of the blue, be super expensive, and you cannot go anywhere because you only have two or three weeks to act on it.”

Sovera instead used Denmark’s state innovation fund, EIFO, which provided debt financing — Laustrup says the loan was approved within 24 hours — without giving up equity.  “This gives us  control over the company to make sure we do what’s best for our team, our customers and at the pace that makes sense”  

What Laustrup would tell other founders

Two pieces of advice came up repeatedly during the conversation:

• Hire fewer, better people — from your own network. Sovera has deliberately hired through trusted referrals rather than open recruiting. “If you bring in a guy or girl, you at least won [before] — the company will do everything to make you successful.” He’s not looking for friendship among colleagues, but for a “thriving environment where there are plenty of rooms to make mistakes” and everyone buys into a shared purpose.
• Revisit your strategy weekly, not just your operations. “Many companies are losing that — they just go back to operations and do things the same way as they did yesterday, and pray and hope for the best,” rather than regularly asking whether their execution still matches their strategy.

Asked to sum up his team in one word, Laustrup didn’t hesitate: “Passion.”

The view from Copenhagen: what Europe gets right, and what it’s still missing

Laustrup is bullish on Denmark’s early-stage environment — and blunt about what happens after that.

On the upside: incorporation is fast (companies can be set up in under a week), the system is heavily digitalised and predictable, and early-stage capital is genuinely accessible. Pre-seed funding, backed by state programmes like EIFO and a dense national angel community, is “easy peasy,” in his words.

The trouble starts at Series A. “A rounds, more than 15 million euros — you have to look outside,” he says. That capital gap is quietly reshaping ownership of some of Denmark’s most promising companies: Laustrup points to examples of fast-growing Danish startups that, just a few years in, are majority-owned by American and UK investors rather than domestic ones — a dynamic he says is now debated “even at a very high political level” in Denmark.

He frames it as a European-scale capital problem, not just a Danish one. Comparing Europe’s collective AI infrastructure investment to what it took to build a single US foundation model lab, he estimates Europe currently has “less than 1% of that capacity.” He argues a recent European fund announcement in the range of €1.5 billion needs to be closer to €15 billion to meaningfully compete. One lever he sees as underused: Europe’s large pension funds, which he says remain largely closed off from investing directly in early-stage startups.

What’s next

Sovera launched publicly in June 2026 and is still in its early growth phase, but Laustrup’s ambitions are clearly shaped by having built — and exited — cybersecurity companies before. His focus for founders reading this: financing structure matters as much as product, hiring discipline compounds over time, and in a market flooded with point solutions, being disciplined about what not to build can be as important as what you do build.

Sasha Komarevych conducted this interview for StartupReporter.eu. AI tools helped transcribe, structure, and edit the raw conversation into this narrative format; the interviewees reviewed and approved the final text before publication.