Europe’s 28th Regime: A Single Startup Framework for a Fragmented Market

Europe doesn’t lack talent, ambition, or capital. What it lacks is coherence. A founder can launch a business in Dublin, raise from investors in Paris, hire in Berlin, and sell into Milan - yet each of those steps is governed by a different legal regime, a different corporate structure, and a different interpretation of what “compliance” means. The Single Market was designed to create fluidity, but startups still scale as if Europe were stitched together with 27 separate playbooks.

This fragmentation isn’t abstract. It shows up as duplicated legal work, slower expansion, higher costs, and a constant pressure to look elsewhere for growth. It’s also one of the reasons Europe’s most valuable companies often choose to list in the United States, where the rules are unified and capital is abundant.

The 28th regime is the European Commission’s attempt to address this structural problem directly. Rather than asking startups to interpret and re-interpret national rules, it proposes one optional, EU-wide framework - a single set of company law, governance standards, investor protections, and reporting obligations. In other words: scale once, not 27 times.