He left a Big Tech analytics firm to build its antithesis. At 32, Christos Floros is taking on Meta and TikTok with Monnett — a human-centred, ad-free social network built in Luxembourg.

At 32, Christos Floros is doing something most founders wouldn’t dare: taking on Meta, TikTok, and the entire surveillance economy — from a standing start in Luxembourg. His platform, Monnett, has 75,000 registered members, €800,000 in seed funding, and a radical premise: that people deserve a social network that works for them, not against them. No algorithm addiction. No ad tracking. No AI-generated noise. Just connection. We sat down with Christos Floros to find out what it really takes to challenge Big Tech from the heart of Europe.

Before Monnett, you worked at Talkwalker — a company specialising in social media data analytics. There’s an almost paradoxical irony there: you spent years helping brands exploit these very platforms before deciding to challenge them. How did that experience shape your critical view of the dominant model?

I learnt a lot at Talkwalker. It was a great company to work for, with an entrepreneurial, start-up spirit. Big Tech social networks exploit user data; what Talkwalker does is provide insight into the raw data, which is what allowed me to understand just how much information we are sharing — and ultimately that the hyper-targeted, ad-based revenue model (often called surveillance advertising) has multiple thorns for the end-user.

Christos Floros, Founder of Monnett (Photo © Stephanie Jabardo / Silicon Luxembourg)

You wear several hats at once — architect, political activist, tech entrepreneur. That’s an unusual profile in Luxembourg’s startup ecosystem. How do those three identities actually come together in the day-to-day reality of building Monnett?

Everything I do starts with one question: how can I make a contribution to the people around me, to society around me? I keep asking that question, and it’s taking me to all sorts of interesting, different places.

At 32, you’re taking on Meta, TikTok, and the American Big Tech giants head-on. What was the defining moment — that conviction that you had to do this, that it was no longer just an idea?

There wasn’t a single defining moment. It’s the accumulation of events in the last decade. Brexit, the election of Donald Trump in 2016, Covid-19 misinformation spreads, the rapid polarisation of our societies — you realise that we now exist, and co-exist, through para-social digital spaces. The media were replaced by social media; that’s where perception is shaped. NATO recognised this as cognitive warfare. After running in the European elections and touring the US with the State Department talking to US military personnel, it became obvious: if Europe is to remain independent and sovereign, we need our own tools to communicate.

[Read the full Interview on Silicon Luxembourg]