How a Lisbon Startup Helps Speed You Through JFK and Heathrow

If you’ve shown your passport checking in, why do you have to show it at border control?

Vision-Box Chief Executive Officer Miguel Leitmann.
Photograph by Paulo Segadaes for Bloomberg Businessweek

Provide news feedback or report an error

Confidential tip?

Send a tip to our reporters

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

By Joao Lima

October 13, 2016 at 5:59 PM UTC

This article is for subscribers only.

This article is part of the October 17, 2016 issue of businessweek.

While researching video surveillance at a government lab in Lisbon, Miguel Leitmann and Bento Correia saw commercial potential in technologies they were developing. The two founded Vision-Box, which helped create Portugal’s first biometric, chip-equipped passports and, later, electronic kiosks and gate systems using facial recognition that help travelers move quickly through immigration and customs. The company’s e-gates and kiosks are being used at New York’s JFK, London’s Heathrow, and more than 70 other airports. Chief Executive Officer Leitmann discusses the company’s ambitions. —As told to Joao Lima

One of our pilot systems was in Faro, in southern Portugal. A very high-profile U.K. politician went there to play golf and used the e-gates. He said, “I won’t leave the country until I talk with the company that made this technology.” That led to a pilot project in Manchester and was our springboard for the European and worldwide markets.