From 8 MHz to 4.5 million tickets a year

Andrej Kores and Zoran Bistrički gained their first professional experience at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing at the University of Ljubljana: microprocessor programming, industrial process automation and the first software for end users.

They built their own system development platform and a relational database management system called AZ TreeBase (AZ3base), notable for its excellent support for tree data structures. The programming language was Borland Turbo Pascal. The hardware was an Intel 286 processor running at 8 MHz with 4 MB of RAM under PC DOS.

This foundation proved its worth. Solutions built on it stayed in production for more than 20 years, surviving technological shifts and even the millennium bug without incident. The rapid application development platform they created became the cornerstone of decades of software.

Kores and Bistrički set out on their own. The core team formed quickly: Matjaž Škrlj joined in late 1990 and Robert Snoj in early 1991. They registered as an independent research group in software engineering under the name “Programska delavnica A&Z” (Programming Workshop A&Z).

The name was chosen deliberately. While every software company of the era called itself “soft” or “lab”, they picked “delavnica” (workshop) to bring computing closer to its users. The unusual name quickly became recognised on the Slovenian market and associated with high-quality, reliable and user-friendly solutions.

Their first major projects were in healthcare: SPC XXI for centralised vaccine procurement, storage and distribution, and Survival XXI for tracking communicable diseases and epidemics. Both were developed with epidemiology experts from the Institute of Public Health of Slovenia. The company Programski atelje A&Z d.o.o. was formally registered in April 1996.

The second decade brought a decisive strategic shift: complete specialisation in ticketing. The team recognised early that the future belonged to multi-purpose, integrated platforms in which online sales would become the main channel.

They formulated a long-term development vision with a clearly defined goal: to build a modern, user-friendly, technologically advanced, multi-purpose and fully integrated digital platform for marketing and selling tickets and related products.

By staying a step ahead of what users actually needed, they set new standards in ticket sales on the domestic and wider regional markets. The foundation for what would become mojekarte was laid.

The third decade was defined by complete specialisation and international expansion. The team accumulated technological, organisational, business, marketing and international experience that brought the company to the highest professional level of operation.

This was the era of the fourth-generation DRAGON Ticketing platform and the mojekarte brand. Market share grew significantly across Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia, and a dedicated company, Moje karte d.o.o., was established in Banja Luka to serve the Bosnian market. The platform now ran everything from theatres and stadiums to caves and festivals.

The references accumulated: the 15-year partnership with Postojnska jama (Postojna Cave), SNG Maribor, SNG Opera in balet Ljubljana, HNK Split and HNK Rijeka. The third decade proved that deep specialisation and patience build something no startup can replicate.

Entering its fourth decade, a core team of 16 across Programski atelje A&Z d.o.o. in Ljubljana and the subsidiary Moje karte d.o.o. in Rijeka, Croatia, carries forward the creativity and development drive that define the company.

The visionary, inventive DNA built into the company from the very first lines of code on an 8 MHz processor continues to drive development. The team is confident it will stay competitive and keep setting trends in ticketing for years to come.

More than 4.5 million tickets a year. 800+ points of sale. National theatres in Slovenia and Croatia. From Postojnska jama to FK Crvena zvezda. The technology changed. The mission stayed the same: build solutions that work when it matters most.