Andreas, Alexander and Martin got to know each other during the Creators Camp Lungau organized by Silicon Castles. They came up with the idea of building an eCommerce system that would enable the 100,000 people stuck in traffic jams on the A10 in the summer to buy products from regional suppliers from the region (the world behind the noise barrier, so to speak). Drones would be used to deliver the products to the cars in the traffic jam. That was the starting signal for VIABIRDS. The idea fascinated so much that based on that, a company was founded with the goal to develop eGrocery software. This is how Alexander Planitzer, CEO of VIABIRDS, tells at Spryker Expo 2022 how the company’s foundation was shaped according to this idea: „Our story began back in 2019, my co-founder Martin and I were attending a so-called design thinking workshop. This took place in our home village, so just for your understanding we grew up in a very rural Austrian area. We have nice lakes, we have nice mountains for skiing, but besides that there is really nothing. The next bigger city, Salzburg, is around two hours away. So, the overall theme of this design thinking workshop was the question: how a faraway region can strengthen its economy as well as enhance the quality of life for the people living there. This region where we grew up called Lungau has one big problem, it’s mostly inaccessible for the big highway the Tauern Autobahn crossing it. It’s a popular vacation spot for a lot of Austrian and German tourists, but that’s it. So, on that day Martin and I had the following idea: let’s develop an E-Commerce System that allows people to order products while they are stuck in traffic and then use drones to deliver the products to the customers. The idea was to firstly create a better traffic jam experience for our region and to secondly create a sales channel for our local producers. Now I know this is a very futuristic idea and that it also sounds stupid in some ways, but this was fascinating us so much that we decided to found a company with the vision of making eGrocery convenient for everyone. Some weeks later Martin and I had a meeting with Asfinag which is the Austrian public highway operator. We had prepared some nice slides, some nice simulations and we presented our idea. I can tell you those guys thought we were absolutely crazy and so there was no second meeting. But the goal of our company at that time was to develop E-Commerce System for eGrocery in regions with a very low consumer density. A lot of companies have successfully shown that eGrocery can be done in bigger cities with a high consumer density, but our goal is to do eGrocery outside bigger cities and to even bring it to rural regions.”