The problem
A development team finishes an AI feature — and still can't ship it, because a customer's data-processing agreement or their own data protection officer rules out a non-European provider. "We'll pick the EU region" often isn't a full answer: where a request is processed and who controls the infrastructure behind it are two different questions, and procurement offices increasingly tell them apart.
konduit tries to solve that problem at the API level instead of the contract level: a gateway that routes requests to providers in Europe and states, for every model, exactly how much weight its sovereignty claim can carry.
One endpoint, one base-URL swap
konduit speaks the OpenAI API. Existing SDKs, frameworks and custom integrations keep working unchanged — only the base URL and the key change. Requests and responses are relayed byte for byte, aside from the routing decision inside the request and the usage fields requested for billing.
The catalogue decides which provider serves a request — providers such as Scaleway, OVHcloud and Hetzner are connected. A request can optionally carry a sovereignty policy: required attestations, allowed hosting countries, zero-retention. Those fields filter the eligible providers before a request is sent, and are never forwarded to a provider themselves. If a provider fails, the gateway falls back to the next eligible one — and every response names who actually served it.
Sovereignty as metadata
The idea underneath: the models aren't European, the hosting is. konduit makes that distinction machine-readable: GET /v1/models returns, for every model in the catalogue, its operator, hosting country, ownership and attestation tier — including a mandatory evidence_url field that backs the claim. A tier is never listed higher than that evidence supports.
Four tiers:
- sovereign — the highest tier, third-party attestations such as C5 Type 2 or SecNumCloud.
- certified — third-party audited with a narrower scope, such as ISO 27001.
- declared — a provider's own claim without third-party attestation, labelled as such.
- flagged — European operation with non-European ownership or hybrid routing.
This information is available through the API, not just as prose on a page: a compliance team can query the catalogue programmatically instead of relying on a claim.
Billing and keys
Billing is usage-based from a prepaid balance, with no contract; the balance doesn't expire. Every charge rests solely on usage reported by the provider — a local estimate may size a hold, but it never grounds a charge.
Each API key belongs to exactly one workload and carries a budget and a rate limit, enforced before a request ever reaches a provider. Prompts and responses are never written to logs or traces. And because inference and the control plane are separate concerns: an outage of the control plane never stops inference already running.
Stack
- Go for the four core services: the gateway as the data plane, a ledger doing double-entry bookkeeping with holds, a control API for the catalogue, organisations and keys, and a worker for asynchronous usage processing.
- Next.js for the console, the marketing site and the planned documentation.
- PostgreSQL for storage, gRPC between the internal services, OpenTelemetry for observability.
Status
The marketing site is live at konduit.eu. Everything else — gateway, ledger, control API, worker and console — is still being built and isn't publicly usable yet. The name is deliberately a working title, and so are the brand and the domain.
Why we're building this
We see the problem from two sides. As a consultancy, we regularly watch an otherwise finished project stall at exactly this point: a data protection officer or a procurement office won't accept the intended provider. And we build software ourselves that runs into the same wall.
konduit is aimed at development teams working under European compliance requirements, as well as regulated mid-market and public-sector organisations for whom picking a provider without solid evidence isn't an option. The goal isn't to be the fastest or cheapest gateway, but the most honest one: an attestation tier that's never claimed higher than it's proven.