Conta started in 2009 as a free invoicing program built by three founders (a journalist, a developer and an accountant) frustrated with how hard it was to run a small business in Norway. It is operated by Conta AS (org 998 807 867) under parent Conta Group AS (org 816 909 252, a ~13-company group), headquartered in Stavanger with offices in Ålesund, Oslo and a development office in Brazil, plus remote developers worldwide (~67 employees). The hook is genuinely free, unlimited invoicing (Premium ~$10.49/mo billed annually unlocks reminders, recurring invoices, branding removal); optional paid add-ons cover bookkeeping, VAT/MVA filing via Altinn, bank sync (ZTL), payroll and EHF e-invoicing. 165,000–260,000 business users across ~10 countries (NO, ES, IE, AU, NZ, IN, ID, PH, ZA, US). Ownership is clean and local, founders plus Must Invest AS (Erik Must) since 2020, with no US venture or private-equity capital, and Conta Group also co-owns Norwegian email-marketing tool Mailmojo. The catch for sovereignty buyers is the substrate: customer invoices, files and databases live on Amazon AWS (EC2/S3/RDS/DynamoDB/Lambda), with SendGrid, Google, Sentry, New Relic and Meta/LinkedIn trackers in the stack. Conta keeps everything inside EU/EEA regions and mirrors a backup to Norwegian Jottacloud, but the host and a long tail of sub-processors are US-owned, so CLOUD Act exposure is material despite the Norwegian cap table.