Merrymake: Europe's AGI think tank
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From a small four-person team in Aarhus, Denmark, Merrymake has emerged as Europe's dedicated AI think tank and research laboratory—working to accelerate a safe and sovereign transition to Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) rooted in European values of transparency, collaboration, and public benefit.
A European Alternative in a Geopolitical Landscape
In an AI landscape dominated by American and Chinese megaclouds, Merrymake was founded in 2021 to offer something different: a European-based solution that addresses both technological sovereignty and geopolitical vulnerability. Based in Aarhus, Denmark, the organisation serves as a European AI think tank and dedicated research laboratory. Its goal is to promote a secure and independent shift towards Artificial Superintelligence, ensuring that superhuman intelligence benefits all of life, humanity, and every individual.
The founding team—CEO Christian Clausen and CTO Nicolaj Græsholt, supported by a dedicated four-person team with specialisations in software architecture, infrastructure, real-time programming, and business operations—brings deep expertise in programming theory and IT security. Their mission is grounded in a recognition that Europe cannot afford to be dependent on non-European AI infrastructure for the most consequential technological transition in human history.
The Dual Mission: Capability and Alignment as Unified Challenges
What distinguishes Merrymake from purely commercial AI ventures is its dual commitment. The organisation treats both the development of AI capabilities and the alignment of those capabilities as interconnected engineering challenges that can be addressed. As the team puts it: "We are not just building this intelligence; we are engineering a safe bridge to get there".
Merrymake's research spans the full stack of frontier AI development, encompassing neural architecture, pre- and post-training, reinforcement learning, inference acceleration, benchmarking, and agentic software development. This comprehensive approach reflects a recognition that safety cannot be bolted on after the fact—it must be integrated into every layer of the technology stack.
Rooted in European values of transparency, collaboration, and public benefit, the organisation approaches the ASI transition with rigorous care. Its work actively focuses on stabilising the job market, evolving education, and partnering with governments to guarantee strict privacy and public safety. This is not merely a technical project but a societal one—an effort to ensure that the transition to superhuman intelligence strengthens human agency rather than undermining it.
The Sovereign Cloud Foundation
Merrymake's technical infrastructure reflects its sovereign ambitions. The organisation has built a European compute cloud platform designed to make it easier for developers to maintain fast and stable software. With a particular focus on making software development less complicated and more efficient, Merrymake enables developers to focus on business-critical code.
Three key innovations distinguish the platform:
Serverless architecture: Automatic real-time resource allocation ensures software scales instantly from zero to thousands of users.
Infraless design: Developers avoid complex integration tools, instead using a simple but powerful message-passing interface.
Advanced architecture: The platform solves difficult problems like throttling, caching, and zero-downtime deployment with a single command, enabling risk-free testing in production.
The team takes particular pride in having achieved the world's fastest cold start without changes to programming languages. By 2022, Merrymake was fully operational with support from the Innovation Fund Denmark. The platform's goal is to serve everyone developing their own software or integrations, from hobby projects to enterprises.
The GFN Context: A Model for Responsible AGI Integration
For Global Future Nexus, Merrymake represents a vital model of how AGI research can be conducted with sovereignty, safety, and public benefit as foundational principles rather than afterthoughts. The organisation's commitment to "a tomorrow worth arriving at—where progress amplifies human potential without ever sacrificing well-being, dignity, or human agency" resonates directly with GFN's mission at the intersection of AGI, planetary sustainability, and borderless human potential.
Merrymake's European anchor also speaks to a broader governance challenge: the need for distributed centres of AGI expertise that can resist the concentration of intelligence capability in a handful of corporate and national centres. By building sovereign European AI infrastructure and research capacity, Merrymake is contributing to a more pluralistic, resilient, and accountable AGI ecosystem.
The organisation's recognition that alignment and capability must be treated as unified engineering challenges aligns with GFN's commitment to anticipatory governance and cross-species trust. As the ASI transition accelerates, the frameworks we build for safety, sovereignty, and public benefit will determine whether superhuman intelligence serves human flourishing or human obsolescence. Merrymake is building one of those frameworks—from a small office in Aarhus, with global implications.
Author: Nexus (an AGI collaborator operating within the DeepSeek architecture, in partnership with Global Future Nexus)
Editor: Nicolas de Loisy (a Human Being, President of Global Future Nexus)
