FAQ

The Sovereign Tech Fund started in October 2022 and is financed by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action. It is currently incubated at SPRIND GmbH.

The Sovereign Tech Fund has a total of EUR 11.5 million available for 2023.

In the 2024 German federal budget, EUR 17 million were allocated to the Sovereign Tech Fund.

Projects are identified by the Sovereign Tech Fund team through a scouting process based on research and recommendations (“pull” method) and through an open application process (“push” method).

If you submitted an application through our application system, you selected whether we can send you emails when you registered. If you did not agree to this option, we unfortunately cannot contact you. You can change this in your account settings. If you agree to receive emails from us, we will contact you about successful as well as unsuccessful applications. We are currently receiving many requests, our team is processing them as fast as we can. We appreciate your patience and anticipate being able to respond within a few weeks.

We ask for regular progress reports, these are usually connected to invoicing. The exact form and format is established between the project maintainers and contributors and their STF point of contact, the program manager. Our goal is to make this as straightforward as possible, and can take the form of an email with links to pull requests in the repository, bullet points, or a short prose summary.

At the end of a project’s contract with STF, we also require a final report. This includes a write-up of the impact the investment had on the project and the community, what challenges the project faced, and what the next steps are for the project and/or technology.

STF program managers set up onboarding meetings to clarify any questions. These are a natural extension of the scoping and contracting processes, during which the milestones, scope of work, and contract details are worked out. These meetings mostly take place as online meetings.

You can learn more about our selection process and timeline on the page about applying for general investments. Once a project is selected for support, the contracting phase can take up to two months depending on legal review, procurement, as well as other transparency and publishing requirements.

This takes place before the finalization of the contract, so work has not yet commenced.

Once invoices with reports are submitted and approved, these can take up to 30 days for our accounting team to make payment.

The Sovereign Tech Fund focuses on securing and strengthening open and foundational digital technologies. These communities working on these are distributed all around the world, so we work with people, companies, and FOSS communities everywhere.

The Sovereign Tech Fund is run by Adriana Groh and Fiona Krakenbürger. They bring many years of experience in promoting open source technologies, both in national and international funding programs. Previously, their efforts have focused on the importance of diversity and democratic values in the area of innovation and technology development.

Get updates and job openings in our newsletter and on social media (Twitter, Mastodon, LinkedIn). You can also reach out at info@sovereigntechfund.de.

You can read more about the Bug Resilience Program on its page on this website:

Bug Resilience Program

The Bug Resilience Program also has its own set of frequently asked questions:

BRP FAQ