Press release

For immediate release · Paris, 18 June 2026

Download the press kit (PDF)

Build It Summit launches: a working event for the people building Europe's software, and a question about who controls the stack it runs on

"Sovereignty is not a speech," said Clément Garrigue, founder of Build It Summit. "It is the result of a thousand concrete choices: which database, which model, which host, which contract, which fallback when the thing you depend on disappears. Resilience is the practice. Sovereignty is what you get when enough builders practice it. We did not want one more stage for predictions. We wanted a room for the work."

A working room, not a stage

Build It Summit is built around what gets shipped, across three days:

• Day 1 · Founders & Leaders Gathering, with community side events.
• Day 2 · the Village, conferences, and an evening gathering.
• Day 3 · the Village, conferences, and a day for students and job seekers.

The programme runs in three tracks, Build Lab, Build @ Work, and Sovereign Stack, with sessions of 25 or 50 minutes: panels, keynotes, fireside chats, and labs. The format is deliberate, a working room respects your time.

The Village spans 600 square metres, with a maximum of 50 stands. That cap is fixed. Alongside it, hands-on labs let teams bring real challenges and leave with something built, and matchmaking connects the people building with the people who need it built. You meet the makers.

Build It Summit draws on a push already under way across the continent for software Europe controls. It did not start that conversation. It gathers the people already in it.

The conversation Build It Summit joins

Context, not coverage of BIS. None of the references below mention Build It Summit. They describe the moment, not the event.

Build It Summit did not start the conversation about who controls Europe's software. It is joining one that is already loud. On 18 June 2026, the same day this event opens to the public, a French initiative under the banner "Forces Françaises du Numérique" published an "Appel du 18 juin" for technological sovereignty, covered the same week by Le Point. The framing is close to our own: a third way that is, in the initiative's own words (in French), « ouverte par conception, souveraine par construction » (open by design, sovereign by construction). (Source: ffnum.fr; Le Point, June 2026, link below.)

The vocabulary itself is under scrutiny. Political theorist Asma Mhalla, author of Technopolitique, has warned publicly that sovereignty has become a "souverain malentendu," a word that explains less the more it is used, and has argued that the real question is naming precisely what we are trying to protect. Build It Summit takes that seriously: we treat sovereignty as a result, not a slogan, and resilience as the practice that produces it. (Source: Asma Mhalla, public statements; Le Figaro interview.)

Economist Cristina Caffarra, founder and chair of the EuroStack Foundation, has pushed the debate from supply to demand, calling for "activating the demand side": first measuring where the dependence actually sits, then channelling concrete migration projects toward independent integrators. That demand-side framing matches how Build It Summit is built, around the people who decide what to build on, not only the people who sell to them. The Village, the labs, and the matchmaking exist so that demand can find European supply in the same room.

This reference is to public statements by Cristina Caffarra and to the debate carried by the EuroStack Foundation. Build It Summit is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or approved by the EuroStack Foundation or Cristina Caffarra, neither of whom is associated with this event. None of the people or organisations named in this section mentions Build It Summit.

What happens next

The first partners will be revealed on 1 July 2026, the same day ticketing opens. Programme, speakers, and the Builders REX Awards will be announced in the months that follow.

Open by design: if you build, you belong here, whatever your title and whatever your tools. Make it Concrete.