sipgate

sipgate is a Düsseldorf-headquartered German cloud-telephony, VoIP, and video-conferencing operator founded in 2004 by **Tim Mois** and **Thilo Salmon** — co-founders who continue to lead the company two decades later. The company is **self-financed with no outside investors** ever taken — a structurally unusual posture for a 21-year-old German tech firm and one of the cleanest ownership architectures in the directory. All 130 employees work from a single Düsseldorf office; all customer infrastructure and servers are physically located in Germany. The product surface is VoIP-first (business phone numbers, IP-PBX features, SIP trunking, cloud-telephony management, fax, SMS) with video-meeting and conferencing functionality layered on top of the telephony stack. For an EU-sovereignty audit sipgate is a textbook 5/5 listing. The legal entity is a German GmbH; ownership is founder-controlled and self-financed (no PE / no VC / no parent conglomerate); customer voice and video data are stored on German infrastructure under German law and BDSG (Bundesdatenschutzgesetz) protection; cross-border transfers between EU and DE require no SCCs; no US legal entity exists for non-EEA customers. The founders are also widely known in the German engineering culture for sipgate's strong remote-work / pair-programming / "team-Fridays" engineering culture, and the company has been a frequent open-source contributor (sipgate.io developer brand, public APIs). Pricing is not self-serve in the consumer sense — sipgate sells business cloud-telephony tiers with VoIP minute bundles, number ranges, and team-plan seats; specific entry-tier figures were not captured at audit (the .com domain 301-redirects to .de). Best fit: German and Austrian SMBs replacing legacy Deutsche Telekom desk phones with cloud-telephony; European businesses that need a single vendor for VoIP + video + SMS with explicit German data residency; companies that specifically want a founder-controlled, self-financed, no-investor-pressure vendor. Buyers needing enterprise-grade video-only conferencing (large webinar, complex moderation) should also evaluate Whereby (NO), Tixeo (FR), or Pexip (NO) — all covered in this category.