Ask HN: Good locations in Europe to incorporate | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Good locations in Europe to incorporate

We have a pre-seed offer by a European deep tech VC to fund our biotech + ML company. Part of the money this fund is handling is public, and requires our company to be incorporated in the EU. The UK also works for them, and a few other selected countries, since these are part of the EU Framework Programmes.

We are of course discussing this with a tax expert, but there are many different options and other subjective matters aside from tax. Taxation is tricky as many things are changing quite rapidly for founders thanks to Draghi's report. Where would you incorporate? Would you keep your operations in the same place? What are your favorite locations?

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Estonia , it is very cool that as long as you don't pay out dividends the corporate tax is effectively 0.

Which is a little different from the traditional system of spending everything you earn in R&D in order to not pay taxes, in Estonia this means that you can sit on it for a year or two as long as it stays in the company, and then re-invest it when proper opportunity present itself, that is not just re-investing for the sake of avoiding taxes like it happens in every other jurisdiction

Ireland has low corporation tax, high quality of life and everyone speaks English, so if you're coming from the US it might suit. We also have a pretty big pharma presence so you'd likely be able to find local graduates to fill positions.

Down sides would the high cost of living, and property.

Go with the UK unless you have a good reason not to as it will make follow up funding much easier.

I don't think one can reasonably suggest a location with only the information you've given, but it is worth considering where your most senior employees and their administrative staff will be based. Not all countries in Europe have fully electronic submission of business documents, so you will need a physical presence that is actually manned. There are companies who can provide addresses or PO boxes for forwarding, but I'm not sure I would trust those with anything valuable - directors are still personally responsible for official communication.

As a British person, I suggest you be careful with incorporating in the UK. It is in many respects an excellent location for entrepreneurship, but the new Labour government and Trump's re-election in the USA means that our relationship with the EU could go either way. If you absolutely need public money from the Commission to make the business work, there are 27 countries that don't have the imminent risk of that disappearing!

Place where your future personnel is?

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