OpenClaw in Vienna: “All Here to Celebrate Our Boy”
The claw has struck – and Austria’s tech community finally has reason to celebrate again after a far too long dry spell. While Austria recently made headlines with enormously low funding figures (down 56% in 2025) and a very poor ranking among Europe’s startup hubs (rank 143), Peter Steinberger (ex-PSPDFKit) has delivered a surprise success with OpenClaw (ex Clawdbot/Moltbot). And this in an industry dominated primarily by heavyweights like OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI.
Around 500 guests gathered at the Startup House near Vienna’s Prater to see Steinberger speak live about OpenClaw, the open source AI agent. Actually, Steinberger moved to San Francisco in the course of the OpenClaw hype to continue building there, but returned to his hometown for the event at short notice. Startup representatives from Austria made sure to be there. Andreas Klinger (Prototype) was there, as were Felix Krause (ContextSDK), Peter Lasinger (3VC), Christian Trummer (Bitpanda), Andrei Podlesnyi (Hans(wo)men Group), Markus Raunig (AustrianStartups), Georg Molzer (Shadowmap), and Alexander Maitz (CTO of newsrooms).
Enormous Turnout at Startup House
The turnout was huge. “We had to open an additional venue for the joint broadcast because this venue was completely booked out,” said co-organizer Klinger, who also flew in specially for the event. “We are all here to celebrate our boy.” The event, titled ClawCon, brought nothing new in terms of content regarding OpenClaw, but primarily offered the community itself a chance to showcase their self-built tools and integrations for OpenClaw.
Briefly for those unfamiliar with OpenClaw: it is software by Steinberger with which you can essentially build your own AI agent. You can give OpenClaw access to your entire computer and the data on it (e.g., emails, but also your browser), connect your AI model of choice (e.g., Claude from Anthropic, Grok from xAI, GPT-5 from OpenAI, but also self-hosted open source LLMs), and then communicate with the AI agent via a channel like WhatsApp or Telegram.
A Platform That More and More Want to Connect To
What is truly special about OpenClaw compared to, say, “Computer Use” from Anthropic is that the AI runs continuously and does not wait for instructions to complete a task, but can also be active overnight. The other – and for many security-conscious people alarming – aspect is that apparently many users simply give access to their entire computer and let the AI work with all this data (see below).
Currently there are signs that OpenClaw could become a novel platform to which more and more services connect. As reported, the company Lovense from Singapore wants to have its vibrators controlled via OpenClaw through AI. In Vienna, a number of developers presented their OpenClaw creations, ranging from an OpenClaw-managed mini-brewery, to a memebattle platform à la Moltbook, to full home automation.
Alarming Security Problems
That the issue of security remains largely unresolved amid all the euphoria became evident in many places. Most participants seemed to care little about data protection – quite the opposite: a particularly striking example was provided by a user who had loaded his entire email inbox into his OpenClaw system. The AI then unprompted created a personal health dashboard – complete with a visualization of his dental health, derived from dental correspondence, as well as an overview of his blood values.
What passed as an impressive demonstration of proactive AI capabilities simultaneously revealed a fundamental problem: if a system independently extracts and processes the most intimate health data from private emails, the question arises of who else has access to this information – and what happens if such systems fall into the wrong hands. As reported, Steinberger is currently taking steps to close the security gaps in OpenClaw (more on that here).
Community, Not Just Code
Peter Steinberger certainly brings a lot of experience to his new project, having already played the startup game once – only it did not end with the hoped-for happy ending. After the majority sale of his company PSPDFKit for over 100 million to Insight Partners, he fell into a hole. What followed is what he himself describes as “typically post-exit”: celebrating, traveling, therapy, experiments with ayahuasca. The search for meaning lasted three years until he returned to what he really loves: coding. What followed was an almost manic experimentation – he tinkered through 43 projects before finally landing the big hit.
Now Steinberger has the chance to create a novel global AI movement – the crustacean in the logo and the claw hand as a trademark have already become memes. “He didn’t just develop software,” says Mario Zechner, software developer and business angel. “He built a worldwide community of lovable, creative people who want to shape the future. That is so much more valuable than a piece of code.”
