The world’s first airport to require biometric boarding is set to arrive in 2025
A woman tests Vueling’s new biometric recognition system at El Prat airport, January 19, 2023, in El Prat de Llobregat, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.
David Zorrakino | Europa Press | Getty Images
As end-of-summer travel lines back up at TSA airport checkpoints in the U.S., one overseas airport is going all-in on a biometric passenger experience. The Smart Travel Project at Zayed International Airport in Abu Dhabi will involve biometric sensors at every airport identification checkpoint by 2025.
Airport security and travel experts have generally cheered the move.
“They are boldly moving forward in adopting facial recognition as the means to let travelers into their system, and I commend them for doing it,” said Sheldon Jacobson, an engineering and computer science professor at the University of Illinois. Jacobson has been studying airport security since the 1990s and helped the TSA develop its pre-screening program, which allows some travelers in the U.S. to skip the checkpoints. “Facial recognition is the future, and we will start to get intelligent with airport security and focus on the traveler rather than the items they bring. By doing that, you create a different paradigm,” Jacobson said. “What they are doing in Abu Dhabi is just the beginning, but it has to start somewhere.”
Going completely paperless from the parking garage to your seat-back tray table is unnerving to some who wonder if a Crowdstrike-type outage could bring down fully electronic boarding systems and grind travel to a halt. But Jacobson says those are very rare events, and even if the system completely shut down because of an outage, the net benefits of a biometric travel experience over time will outweigh the costs.
Zayed International Airport’s program relies on a partnership with the government. The UAE’s Federal Authority for Identity, Citizenship, Customs & Port Security collects biometrics from any traveler arriving in the UAE for the first time. The airport then uses this database to verify passengers passing checkpoints. The airport did not respond to a request for comment on its plans. Saeed Saif Al Khaili, General Director at the United Arab Emirate’s Federal Authority for Identity, Citizenship, Customs, and Port Security, said in a recent press release that the Biometric Smart Travel project “aims to enhance the travel experience at Zayed International Airport from curb to gate, ensuring high levels of security and safety.”
Jacobson says the TSA tends to move more slowly and incrementally on changes, and that the UAE’s political system allows for faster implementation of programs, so this all-encompassing collection of biometric data likely wouldn’t fly in the U.S., at least not now. Whenever new biometric programs are introduced, he said, there is “tremendous pushback.”
Still, the U.S. public appears to be getting more comfortable with usage of biometrics at airports.
According to data analytics firm J.D. Power and Associates, a majority (53%) of those surveyed at major U.S. airports say biometrics in airports are a good idea or they are willing to use a biometric security check. An additional 12% say they are a good idea but have privacy concerns.
Among the concerns expressed are what type of data someone would need to give during the biometric enrollment process, and whether biometric security processes will be used to track movements throughout the airport, or if biometric data will be used outside the airport.
“To make the technology more widespread and allow airports and travelers to take advantage of it, airports should establish clear guidelines and processes and make travelers aware of potential uses. Buy-in from travelers is essential,” says Mike Taylor, J.D. Power’s senior managing director of travel, hospitality, and retail.
Shawn DuBravac, futurist and author of “Digital Destiny: How the New Age of Data Will Transform the Way We Work, Live, and Communicate,” said he believes biometrics will transform travel. “While we’ve seen growing use of biometric sensors to streamline travel, the vision of a fully paperless experience by next year is incredibly ambitious,” he said.
Travel veterans generally agree that some aspects of biometrics will be involved in future airport visits if they aren’t already. DuBravac sees biometrics at airports in the U.S. used as a tool to make the human element more responsive.
“Instead of managing mundane tasks like document verification, personnel can provide higher levels of customer service, assist travelers with special needs, and ensure that the overall passenger experience is efficient and welcoming. Automating routine processes will empower a more human experience,” he said.
Billionaire Elon Musk lauded Zayed’s innovation, commenting on X in response to a video that showed a traveler breezing through check-in at the Abu Dhabi airport that the U.S. needs to “catch up.”
“Musk’s comments are close to wishful thinking,” said Irina Tsukerman, a national security lawyer and fellow at the Arabian Peninsula Institute. She noted that privacy concerns and costs would likely prevent the implementation of a whole biometric airport experience in the U.S.
“This worked in Abu Dhabi because UAE is a small, wealthy monarchy with a high degree of population trust in the government and sufficient resources to devote to technical innovation,” Tsukerman said. The same ingredients aren’t in place in the U.S. “Transition to full automation for all eligible travelers will be time-consuming, onerous, expensive, and meet resistance from airport worker unions,” she said.
Despite Musk dinging U.S. airports, it isn’t like there isn’t a biometric presence in the United States.
In 2018, LAX became one of the first airports in the United States to pilot biometric boarding, and today, it is used as an option for qualifying passengers.
“At LAX, we use biometrics to support our airline partners and federal authorities to speed up the process of boarding international departing flights,” said Ian Law, chief digital transformation officer, Los Angeles World Airports, which includes LAX. There are up to four biometric lanes at each international departure gate and facial recognition technology can be used to do touchless, paperless traveler verification.
“Airlines are able to significantly reduce the time needed to board a flight, cutting the time travelers stand in line,” Law said.
While no U.S. airports are close to Abu Dhabi’s goal of a completely biometric airport, plenty of airports in the United States at least use some biometrics. According to the TSA, its PreCheck option is currently available at more than 200 airports with over 90 participating airlines nationwide and has a voluntary facial recognition component. To be approved for PreCheck, participants fill out an online form, pay a fee, undergo a background check, an in-person interview, and can opt-in for a facial recognition scan.
Clear, a publicly trading company, has also made inroads into more than 55 U.S. airports, allowing those who pay a fee and undergo prescreening to skip the lines and board biometrically. The service has made some lawmakers balk at creating a tiered system of travelers, and in California a group of lawmakers tried – but failed — earlier this year to restrict Clear.
Travel technology provider Amadeus is not involved in the Abu Dhabi airport’s biometric program but has them at other airports, such as Dubai, Vancouver, Perth, and London’s Heathrow airport. Chris Keller, vice president of airport and airline operations at Amadeus, says that for the foreseeable future, airports will be able to implement paper backups if there is a technological issue. “We expect increasing numbers of passengers to use biometrics, but there will always be a group, perhaps those that need special assistance or premium passengers, who will choose an agent-assisted experience and prefer a paper document,” Keller said.
Jacobson says that would-be criminals will be thwarted by the fact that their faces will be known in a biometric airport system. “Once the person is known this has a deterrence effect and drives down the risk,” he said. But he also indicated that Musk’s comments lack proper context. “It is not that we are behind, this is an incremental process of growth and development,” he said. “We won’t get there this week. It takes a certain amount of will and proof of concept.”
For example, when PreCheck in was rolled out in 2011 it had taken eight years from proposal to implementation.
“People are uncomfortable with change, anytime you make changes we have to do it more efficiently, more securely and less intrusively,” Jacobson said.
In the U.S., it’ll probably be awhile until getting from terminal check-in to airplane seat involves just showing your face.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks at the Axel Springer building in Berlin on Oct. 17, 2023. He received the annual Axel Springer Award.
Ben Kriemann | Getty Images
Among the thousands of Microsoft employees who lost their jobs in the cutbacks announced this week were 830 staffers in the company’s home state of Washington.
Nearly a dozen game design workers in the state were part of the layoffs, along with three audio designers, two mechanical engineers, one optical engineer and one lab technician, according to a document Microsoft submitted to Washington employment officials.
There were also five individual contributors and one manager at the Microsoft Research division in the cuts, as well as 10 lawyers and six hardware engineers, the document shows.
Microsoft announced plans on Wednesday to eliminate 9,000 jobs, as part of an effort to eliminate redundancy and to encourage employees to focus on more meaningful work by adopting new technologies, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC. The person asked not to be named while discussing private matters.
Scores of Microsoft salespeople and video game developers have since come forward on social media to announce their departure. In April, Microsoft said revenue from Xbox content and services grew 8%, trailing overall growth of 13%.
In sales, the company parted ways with 16 customer success account management staff members based in Washington, 28 in sales strategy enablement and another five in sales compensation. One Washington-based government affairs worker was also laid off.
Microsoft eliminated 17 jobs in cloud solution architecture in the state, according to the document. The company’s fastest revenue growth comes from Azure and other cloud services that customers buy based on usage.
CEO Satya Nadella has not publicly commented on the layoffs, and Microsoft didn’t immediately provide a comment about the cuts in Washington. On a conference call with analysts in April, Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said the company had a “focus on cost efficiencies” during the March quarter.
WATCH: Microsoft layoffs not performance-based, largely targeting middle managers
Technology
IPO market gets boost from Circle’s 500% surge, sparking optimism that drought may be ending
Jeremy Allaire, CEO and co-founder of Circle Internet Group, the issuer of one of the world’s biggest stablecoins, and Circle Internet Group co-founder Sean Neville react as they ring the opening bell, on the day of the company’s IPO, in New York City, U.S., June 5, 2025.
NYSE
For over three years, venture capital firms have been waiting for this moment.
Tech IPOs came to a virtual standstill in early 2022 due to soaring inflation and rising interest rates, while big acquisitions were mostly off the table as increased regulatory scrutiny in the U.S. and Europe turned away potential buyers.
Though it’s too soon to say those days are entirely in the past, the first half of 2025 showed signs of momentum, with June in particular producing much-needed returns for Silicon Valley’s startup financiers. In all, there were five tech IPOs last month, accelerating from a monthly average of two since January, according to data from CB Insights.
Highlighting that group was crypto company Circle, which more than doubled in its New York Stock Exchange debut on June 5, and is now up sixfold from its IPO price for a market cap of $42 billion. The stock got a big boost in mid-June after the Senate passed the GENIUS Act, which would establish a federal framework for U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins.
Venture firms General Catalyst, Breyer Capital and Accel now own a combined $8 billion worth of Circle stock even after selling a fraction of their holdings in the offering. Silicon Valley stalwarts Greylock, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital are set to soon profit from Figma’s IPO, after the design software vendor filed its public prospectus on Tuesday. Since its $20 billion acquisition agreement with Adobe was scrapped in late 2023, Figma has been one of the most hotly anticipated IPOs in startup land.
It’s “refreshing and something that we’ve been waiting for for a long time,” said Eric Hippeau, managing partner at early-stage venture firm Lerer Hippeau, regarding the exit environment. “I’m not sure that we are confident that this can be a sustained trend yet, but it’s been very encouraging.”
Another positive sign for the industry the past couple months was the performance of artificial infrastructure provider CoreWeave, which went public in late March. The stock was relatively stagnant for its first month on the market but shot up 170% in May and another 47% in June.
For venture firms, long considered the lifeblood of risky tech startups, IPOs are essential in order to generate profits for the university endowments, foundations and pension funds that allocate a portion of their capital to the asset class. Without handsome returns, there’s little incentive for limited partners to put money into future funds.
After a record year in 2021, which saw 155 U.S. venture-backed IPOs raise $60.4 billion, according to data from University of Florida finance professor Jay Ritter, every year since has been relatively dismal. There were 13 such offerings in 2022, followed by 18 in 2023 and 30 last year, collectively raising $13.3 billion, Ritter’s data shows.
The slowdown followed the Federal Reserve’s aggressive rate-hiking campaign in 2022, meant to slow crippling inflation. As the lower-growth environment extended into years two and three, venture firms faced increasing pressure to return cash to investors.
‘Backlog of liquidity’
In its 2024 yearbook, the National Venture Capital Association said that even with a 34% increase in U.S. VC exit value last year to $98 billion, that number is 87% below the 2021 peak and less than half the average for the four years from 2017 through 2020. It’s a troubling dynamic for the 58,000 venture-backed companies that have raised a total of $947 billion from investors, according to the annual report, which is produced by the NVCA and PitchBook.
“This backlog of liquidity drought risks creating a ‘zombie company’ cohort — businesses generating operational cash flow but lacking credible exit prospects,” the report said.
Other than Circle, the latest crop of IPOs mostly consists of smaller and lesser-known brands. Health-tech companies Hinge Health and Omada Health are valued at about $3.5 billion and $1 billion, respectively. Etoro, an online trading platform, has a market cap of just over $5 billion. Online banking provider Chime Financial has a higher profile due largely to a years-long marketing blitz and is valued at close to $11.5 billion.
Meanwhile, the highest valued private companies like SpaceX, Stripe and Databricks remain on the sidelines, and AI highfliers OpenAI and Anthropic continue to raise massive amounts of cash with no intention of going public anytime soon.
Still, venture capitalists told CNBC that there are plenty of companies with the financial metrics to be public, and that more of them are readying for the process.
“The IPO market is starting to open and the VC world is cautiously optimistic,” said Rick Heitzmann, a partner at venture firm FirstMark in New York. “We are preparing companies for the next wave of public offerings.”
There are other ways to make money in the meantime. Secondary sales, a process that involves selling private shares to new investors, are on the rise, allowing early employees and investors to get some liquidity.
And then there’s what Mark Zuckerberg is doing, as he tries to position his company at the center of AI innovation and development.
Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during the Meta Connect event on Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Last month, Meta announced a $14 billion bet on Scale AI, taking a 49% stake in the AI startup in exchange for poaching founder Alexandr Wang and a small group of his top engineers. The deal effectively bought out half of the stock owned by investors, leaving them with the opportunity to make money on the rest of their holdings, should a future acquisition or IPO take place.
The deal is a big win for Accel, which led Scale AI’s Series A round in 2017, and is poised to earn more than $2.5 billion in the transaction. Index Ventures led the Series B in 2018, and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund led the Series C the following year at a valuation of over $1 billion.
Investors now hope the Federal Reserve will move toward a rate-cutting campaign, though the central bank hasn’t committed to one. There’s also ongoing optimism that regulators will make going public less burdensome. Last week, Reuters reported, citing sources familiar with the matter, that U.S. stock exchanges and the SEC have discussed loosening regulations to make IPOs more enticing.
Mike Bellin, who heads consulting firm PwC’s U.S. IPO practice, said he anticipates a diversity of IPOs across sectors in the second half of the year. According to data from PwC, pharma and fintech were among the most active sectors for deals through the end of May.
While the recent trend in IPO activity is an encouraging sign for investors, potential roadblocks remain.
Tariffs and geopolitical uncertainty delayed IPO plans from companies including Klarna and StubHub in April. Neither has provided an update on when they plan to debut.
FirstMark’s Heitzmann said the path forward is “not at all clear,” adding that he wants to see a strong quarter of economic stability and growth before confidently saying that the market is wide open.
Additionally, other than CoreWeave and Circle, recent tech IPOs haven’t had big pops. Hinge Health, Chime and eToro have seen relatively modest gains from their offer price, while Omada Health is down.
But virtually any activity beats what VCs were experiencing the last few years. Overall, Hippeau said recent IPO trends are generally encouraging.
“There’s starting to be kind of light at the end of the tunnel,” Hippeau said.
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