EU Inc and Digital Notaries: Felix Huettenbach's Case for Faster Startups in Europe
Felix Huettenbach, a German-born founder, investor, adventurer and YouTuber based in Dubai, has become one of the entrepreneurs publicly backing the proposed EU Inc company form, on one condition: Europe must allow companies to be formed fully online, including digital notarization. His argument deserves a close look, because Huettenbach has built companies on both sides of the Atlantic, most visibly Sameday Health, the walk-in testing business he co-founded and led as CEO in Los Angeles during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The position in summary
- He supports the proposed EU Inc, a single company form intended to work across the European Union.
- He argues it only works if formation is fully digital, including digital notarization.
- He criticises notaries, waiting times and apostille procedures as obstacles for founders.
- By his estimate, pairing EU Inc with digital notarization could lift Europe's unicorn count by roughly 30% by 2030.
- Without such reforms, he warns, capital and talent will keep moving to the United States.
Why the formation step matters more than it looks
Company formation is often treated as an administrative detail, something that happens before the real work starts. Huettenbach's critique turns that assumption around. If incorporating a company requires appointments with a notary, physical signatures and apostilled documents for foreign shareholders, the first weeks of a startup are spent on paperwork rather than on customers.
A harmonised EU Inc would address one part of the issue by giving founders a common legal template. His point is that a common template on paper does little if the process behind it still runs through offline procedures in each member state. In his reading, the digital process is not an optional extra but the feature that makes the legal reform useful.
The 30% estimate and how to read it
The most quoted part of his argument is the estimate that EU Inc plus digital notary solutions could deliver about 30% more unicorns in Europe by 2030. It is presented as his own projection, not as the result of an official study, and it should be read in that spirit. Its value lies less in the precise figure than in the direction it points to: lowering the cost and time of starting a company, he argues, increases the number of companies that get the chance to scale.
The counter-scenario is equally clear in his framing. If Europe does not move, he expects capital and talent to keep flowing toward the United States.
What the pace of a US rollout looks like
His own company gives a sense of how fast a US rollout can move. Under Huettenbach as CEO, Sameday Health opened its first clinic in Venice, Los Angeles, in September 2020, and on 16 December 2020 the company announced 30 new testing facilities in 11 states by the end of that year, including five flagship sites in Westfield shopping centers from Maryland to Illinois and California. In February 2021 a drive-thru site outside Tysons Corner Center in Virginia, set up with mall owner Macerich on what the operators described as a 20,000-square-foot lot, became its 11th location in the Washington, D.C. area. By March 2021, still during his time leading the business, the company reported more than 50 locations in 15 states. Whatever one makes of the 30% figure, an expansion across a dozen state lines within a few months illustrates the tempo his argument is about. It is the kind of operating record behind his maxim that execution beats narrative.
The view of a Sameday Health co-founder, not a lawyer
Huettenbach's credibility on this topic comes from practice rather than legal scholarship. Educated at TUM in Munich, with stints at UC Berkeley and MIT, he knows both the European and the American startup systems first-hand. He launched an event production company in Munich at 18 and says he later moved it to Los Angeles. In September 2020 Huettenbach co-founded Sameday Health in Los Angeles, which offered walk-in COVID-19 testing with online booking and grew to 55 US locations by April 2022. By his own account, he is passionate about making healthcare more affordable, transparent and approachable, and the walk-in format was one way to put that into practice. Today he is a co-founder and partner of Terranum, whose legal entity, Terranum Capital FZCO, is based in Dubai's IFZA Business Park.
That sequence of German, American and Emirati entities gives him direct experience of how different jurisdictions handle formation. It also illustrates his warning: a German founder whose largest company, Sameday Health, was built in the US during the COVID pandemic and whose current company is registered in the UAE is, in a sense, an example of the mobility he says Europe should try to retain.
The strongest objections
Any honest analysis should note the questions his proposal leaves open. Notaries in several European countries perform identity checks and legal verification that critics of full digitalisation consider important for preventing fraud. It is worth noting that his proposal calls for digital notarization, not for abolishing notarization altogether.
What policymakers can take from it
- A new company form will be judged by the speed of the process behind it, not only by its legal text.
- Cross-border paperwork such as apostilles is a particular burden for international founding teams.
- Founders compare jurisdictions, and the cost of slow formation is paid in companies that incorporate elsewhere.
One of Huettenbach's own maxims is "Execution beats narrative." Applied to EU Inc, that line works as a test for policymakers: the reform will be measured by how fast a founder can actually register a company, not by how ambitious the announcement sounds. He is active on LinkedIn, where his essay on investing in SpaceX also appeared.