Altug Eker, Managing Director of Infercom;
Credit: Infercom
On Friday 6 November 2026, Luxembourg-based EU sovereign AI inference company Infercom announced it had won the Gold Stevie Award for AI-Driven Startup of the Year at the 2026 International Business Awards.
The award ceremony, which took place Wednesday 28 October at the Pullman Paris Montparnasse in Paris (France), saw Infercom recognised for its European Sovereign Ultra Speed Inference Service, which gives European organisations high-speed access to leading open-weight AI models, with EU sovereign processing on its own hardware in Munich (Germany).
Winners of the 2026 International Business Awards were determined by the average scores of more than 300 professionals worldwide, who evaluated the nominations over a two-month judging period.
"This Gold Stevie belongs to our team, our customers and our partners, everyone who believed that Europe should not have to choose between speed and sovereignty", said Altug Eker, Managing Director of Infercom.
"When we started Infercom, the question we heard most often was whether a European provider could deliver world-class inference performance while keeping data processing in the EU. Recognition from an international jury of more than 300 professionals tells us the answer is yes. Our job now is to make that choice easy for every European bank, insurer, public institution and AI builder that wants to put the best open models into production with full confidence in where their data lives."
Infercom was built on a simple premise: European enterprises should not have to trade performance for control over their data, and the company runs its own purpose-built AI chips from SambaNova, its first AI compute partner, in a certified data centre in Munich, delivering ultra-fast inference on open-weight models served at their native precision.
By combining high-performance AI inference with European data residency, Infercom said it enables enterprises and AI solution providers to deploy latency-sensitive applications, from real-time conversational AI and customer experience automation to complex agentic workflows, without sacrificing control over sensitive data.
