AI agents for public administration. Sovereign from day one.
BasePeak builds AI agents that work alongside people in public administration and regulated organisations. Its platform runs on enum Kubernetes Engine in Frankfurt, under German jurisdiction, from the first commit.
The company
BasePeak is a German startup building sovereign AI for organisations that cannot send data to US clouds, above all public administration. With BasePeak.AI, and soon BasePeak.WORK, staff work together with AI agents on documents, knowledge and everyday tasks, as SaaS or on-premise and built on open source. Customers include the city of Dormagen. BasePeak was founded by Thorsten Klein, who worked on k3s at Rancher Labs and created k3d.
Visit websiteThe challenge
- Public administration cannot hand citizen data to an AI running on a US-headquartered cloud. Sovereignty has to hold all the way down to the infrastructure.
- Authorities expect verifiable German hosting, a German contracting party and no exposure to the US CLOUD Act before a pilot even starts.
- AI agents need predictable compute, storage for large knowledge bases and low-latency networking between agents, models and integrations.
- As a startup, BasePeak had no team to spare for running infrastructure. The platform had to be ready for public-sector production from day one.
Why enum
Sovereignty that holds in procurement
Frankfurt, a German GmbH, German and EU law only, no US parent and no CLOUD Act. When an authority checks the supply chain, the infrastructure tells the same story as the product.
Built greenfield, no migration tax
Because BasePeak started on enum, there was nothing to migrate. No re-platforming, no data-residency workarounds, no dual-running. The team spent its first weeks building product, not moving it.
CNCF-conformant upstream Kubernetes
BasePeak is built on open source and values portability. enum runs CNCF-conformant upstream Kubernetes with standard manifests, Helm, and GitOps, with no proprietary APIs. What runs on enum runs anywhere.
NVMe storage fast enough to self-host S3
BasePeak runs its own Garage S3 cluster on enum Kubernetes Engine, on top of enum's NVMe-backed block storage. Performance is great, so the team gets sovereign, self-controlled object storage without giving up speed.
Direct access to engineers
As a small team, BasePeak talks directly to the engineers who run the platform. No first-level queue, no ticket loops. Decisions and fixes happen in the same conversation.
enum for Startups
BasePeak joined the enum for Startups program, with cloud credits and conditions for early-stage European teams. Billing is in euros and tied to real usage, so costs stay forecastable.
Architecture
What runs on enum and how the parts fit together.
Results
- AI agents for public administration live in production, on enum from the first commit.
- Sovereignty as a door opener: Frankfurt hosting and German jurisdiction answer the questions authorities ask before a pilot.
- Knowledge stays in a self-hosted Garage S3 cluster on enum, grounding agent answers in the organisation's own documents.
- An open-source stack on CNCF-conformant upstream Kubernetes, fully portable, including on-premise.
- A small team focused on agents, with infrastructure run by a partner that thinks with them.
- All data stays in Frankfurt, under German jurisdiction, with no US dependencies.
"CNCF-conformant, upstream Kubernetes, done exceptionally well."
Why it matters for the public sector
Authorities and their suppliers choose BasePeak because citizen data stays under European control. enum provides the base: Frankfurt, a German GmbH and GDPR-native infrastructure with no CLOUD Act exposure. For BasePeak, sovereignty is not a checkbox. It is the product.
What's next
BasePeak is bringing its agents to more public administrations and regulated organisations and preparing the launch of BasePeak.WORK, with new agents, integrations and the BasePeak Exchange for sharing them. enum remains the sovereign base underneath.
More stories
Your story next.
Talk to our team.
Tell us what you run today. We plan the move with you and stay your platform team afterwards.