§01
Why we started
We kept meeting the same business owner. A bookkeeper on Exact Online. A recruiter on Carerix. A workforce on Personio. An advisor asking, every quarter, for one more export. The data was already digital. It just lived in ten different boxes, none of them their own.
The American playbook said: pay a US vendor to centralise it for you. The European reality said: that vendor is subject to laws you don't write, in a jurisdiction you don't live in, and your auditor will eventually have questions you can't answer. We started Custodea because the choice between modern tooling and legal certainty is a false one.
§02
Where we are
Custodea is operated by Custodea B.V., registered in Amsterdam. Our infrastructure runs on dedicated EU capacity: primary in Falkenstein, Germany; encrypted backups in Helsinki, Finland. No AWS. No Azure. No Google Cloud. No US sub-processors.
We're a small, focused team. We ship connectors monthly, talk to customers daily, and pick up the phone ourselves when the question is big enough. The first wave of connectors covers the Dutch and German SME stack: Exact Online, AFAS, Nmbrs, SnelStart, DATEV, Personio, Lexware, Carerix. These are the systems the competition never bothered to support properly.
§03
Where we're going
The foundation comes first: connect your software, copy the records into your data lake, hand you the keys. Your data lake is the contract — your BI tools connect to it directly, on day one and on day one thousand. No proprietary query layer, no lock-in.
On top of that foundation, we'll go further. Curated transformations for the systems we know best, so the records arrive ready to query. An insights layer for the questions every SME asks: cash position, customer concentration, hiring runway. And a path to put your sovereign data to work with AI, on EU compute, under the same residency guarantees. Always opt-in. Always built on top of the warehouse you already own.
Alongside depth, breadth: more connectors, more languages, more of the European SME stack covered out of the box. ISO/IEC 27001 in 2026. SOC 2 Type II in 2027. The promise doesn't change. Only how far it can take you.