Wicket’s facial authentication platform has surpassed 10 million successful interactions at customer venues and events since launching in 2021. It took three years to reach the first million interactions and only one more year to triple that to three million — a curve driven by full-scale deployments including all 30 NFL venues (2024 season) and Salesforce’s Dreamforce, which saw Digital Pass check-ins triple year-over-year to 23,000. As of September 2026, Wicket supports 100+ customer events and processes nearly 500,000 interactions per month.
The Wicket platform has officially surpassed 10 million successful facial authentication interactions at customer venues and events. The true number of decisions made is far higher, but this means that there were 10 million individual moments where a user of Wicket was able to scan a ticket, make a purchase, open a door, check in to an event, or verify their access to a secure area.
The number is worth pausing on, but how we got there says more. It took three years to reach the first million authentication-enabled interactions, but only one additional year to reach three million. That curve is the actual story, and highlights how getting the train out of the station was the hard part.
Leaving the station
In early 2021, Wicket was born with a mission of creating a better ingress experience for high-volume live event venues. The prior decade saw a shift to digital tickets becoming the industry standard, and the present saw venues worldwide attempting to navigate the uncertain nature of live events in a pandemic-disrupted world.
Alongside our early adopters and visionary customers, Wicket deployed a small number of pilot programs that aimed to test our newly built facial authentication platform to answer two questions:
- Does it help to streamline operations at events?
- Are fans willing to adopt this new technology?
Internally, we knew that the tech worked – we just needed to see that same validation in the wild. Our development team pivoted to shorter sprint cycles so that they could act on customer and user feedback every week. Our operations team worked tirelessly with customer stakeholders to ensure that staff were trained on how to use it and that the layout of the entry lanes worked for their venue. Sales and marketing developed best practices for how to communicate the express entry program to fans.
The first year was a grind; one foot in front of the other in pursuit of meaningful validation of the value of the technology. That persistence slowly began to show positive results.
Gaining Momentum
One factor that helped validate the vision was growing consumer familiarity with using facial authentication. When Apple introduced Face ID in November 2017 to a base of roughly 100 million iPhone users, it made face-based authentication commonplace. Adding to that, millions of people were now using facial authentication to bypass long security lines at airports, which began to build the public perception that using the technology can shorten wait times for those who use it. By the time the Cleveland Browns and the New York Mets, our first customers, concluded their 2020 pilots and officially launched express entry programs in 2021, a meaningful segment of fans had already been unlocking their phones or skipping lines.
Wicket saw that early trend and went all-in on creating solutions for our customers that delivered meaningful impacts on guest experience, event-day operations, and increased revenue. Wicket now had a growing list of interested prospects, was adding additional use-case applications for credentialing and payments to the product, and had real-world data showing that implementing facial authentication programs delivered tangible benefits.
The train was out of the station and beginning to gain momentum, and the broader sports industry began to see enough to adopt and, in some cases, build their own solutions. MLB introduced Go-Ahead Entry in 2023. In 2024, Intuit Dome launched GameFace ID as a core part of a state-of-the-art $2 billion arena build, not as an experiment bolted onto the side.
By 2024, it had become clear that the concept no longer required validation and that questions about operational impact and user adoption – it was time to scale.
Reaching Full Speed
There were many inflection points for Wicket during this period, but two pilot programs from 2023 that turned into full-scale customer deployments of Wicket technology in 2024 truly changed the perception of what use of facial authentication at scale could look like.
The first was at Salesforce’s marquee event, Dreamforce. Following successful pilots at smaller events in early 2023 using our integration with the RainFocus event management platform, Salesforce made the decision to offer a new Digital Pass option using Wicket to speed up check-in and badge printing at Dreamforce.
8,000 attendees ended up using Digital Pass at that event alone to print their badge, which made a measurable impact on what used to be one of the largest issues coming out of the event – wait times. Salesforce then expanded their marketing of the program and number of Digital Pass lanes for Dreamforce 2024, where they nearly tripled usage year over year to 23,000 Digital Pass check-ins – completely transforming the experience for the better.
The second was a six-team NFL credentialing pilot in 2023, where the NFL tested Wicket and our integration with the Accredit accreditation platform against alternative options to achieve one of their most important security goals: accountability.
Through the program, each NFL team set up facial authentication-enabled security checkpoints for credential holders looking to gain access to locker rooms, press boxes, and playing fields. The NFL not only settled on Wicket and Accredit after the pilot, but they took the step to take it league-wide at all 30 NFL venues for the 2024 season. By the end of that season, the program saw over 250k credential holders enrolled and over 1 million access decisions made.
These examples proved to us and the industry that these solutions were no longer a nice-to-have, cool new technology; they were now deemed necessary infrastructure that helped reduce wait times and increase accountability for entry and access to events and managed spaces within them. Since that pivotal moment in the Fall of 2024, the Wicket Express has been running at full speed, and we don’t have any intention of slowing down or looking back.
Ten million of what, exactly?
The part that gets lost when a milestone is reported as a single number—is that those ten million interactions are not ten million of the same thing.
The early deployments were fan-facing: express ticketing and payments. That is where the visible benefit was, and that is where venues started. But as operators lived with the technology and saw how readily it adapted to their specific organizational needs, they extended it inward. Staff and employee access. Facility access control. Vendor and guest credentialing.
The growth in our transaction count reflects two things happening at once — more venues using facial authentication, and each venue using it in more places. Although we care about both as a business, the second trend is the one we watch most closely, because it is the better indicator of whether the technology has become critical infrastructure or is still a nice to have feature.
Above all else, this milestone reflects the visionary mindset that we share with our customers and our ability to turn that vision into reality. As we stand in September of 2026, we see 100+ customer events, 50,000+ new users, and nearly 500,000 successful interactions in a single month.
Yes, we’ll take a moment to celebrate this milestone. Then we’re gonna get right back to work. See you at 50 million, and reach out if you want to hop on the express train and see for yourself.
