Whether at the cinema, in a restaurant, or at the football stadium - during the pandemic, citizens almost everywhere had to present their immunity status. But not everyone owns a smartphone - and if the battery was dead, you were left without proof of vaccination.

We solved exactly this problem with our first company: the Immunkarte - a personal vaccination QR code in credit card format. What sounds so simple quickly became an everyday solution for millions of people.

Our partner mobile app

Immunkarte, a secure and trustworthy identity platform, sold in more than 6 million copies in over 10,000 pharmacies in Germany alone.

Background

In January 2021 – the first COVID vaccinations were administered. At that time, it was said: “In Germany, vaccination status will never have an impact on everyday life.”

Things looked very different in Israel, where the “Green Pass” had already become firmly established in daily life. Our assumption was that, sooner or later, we would see the same development in Germany. And as it turned out - we were right.

The physical Immunkarte

Implementation

In just six weeks after finishing the concept, the Immunkarte was launched – together with the first five partner pharmacies. The first iteration included:

• mobile app for pharmacies to record patients’ vaccination status,
• mobile app for customers to verify their vaccination status via a QR code,
• and an app for restaurant / event staff to verify the QR code and vaccination status.

All that was powered by an Elixir backend and hosted on Google Cloud Platform and running on Kubernetes. We’ve built a highly scalable system, very similar to one developed months later by the Robert Koch Institute.

Results

When strickter verification rules came into effect in Germany in December 2021 and the yellow vaccination booklet was no longer sufficient, demand surged to over 100,000 orders per day. To handle this, we worked simultaneously with up to seven printing companies, equipped more than 1,000 pharmacies in Germany with their own card printer, and managed up to 6,000 customer support calls per day. Our Elixir-backed system handled all that without a hitch.