Why we built Orizn

I started Orizn because I spent most of 2023 standing in the wrong queue at airports. In April it was Bangkok, where the new e-visa I had carefully filled in turned out to be the wrong category. In July it was Hanoi, where the embassy site said one thing in English and another in Vietnamese, and the Vietnamese version was the one that mattered. In October it was Charles de Gaulle, where a friend from Manila — a Philippine passport holder visiting me for two weeks — got pulled into secondary inspection because the airline check-in agent had used a printed cheat sheet from 2019 and refused to believe Schengen had updated its short-stay rules.

Nothing about any of that was unusual. It is what cross-border travel feels like for anyone whose passport is not from one of the eight or nine countries that get waved through everywhere. And it is what cross-border travel feels like, occasionally, even for people whose passports are. Visa rules are not opaque because the world is hostile. They are opaque because the systems we use to look them up are bad.

The trip that broke me

The moment I decided to actually do something about this was in November 2023, sitting in a cafe in Ho Chi Minh City with a friend who was trying to figure out whether she could come visit me from Lagos. She had a Nigerian passport and a Canadian residency permit, and the answer depended on whether Vietnamese consular policy treated the residency as an upgrade for visa-on-arrival eligibility — a question we could not answer from three different government websites, two travel forums, and an hour on the phone with the airline.

Eventually we found the answer (yes, with a $25 stamping fee on arrival) by direct-messaging an immigration lawyer on LinkedIn. He replied in seven minutes. He was apologetic. He said "I get this question forty times a week, and the rules have not changed in two years." The information existed. It was just nowhere a normal traveler would find it.

I went home that night and started writing the schema for what would become Orizn's visa database. Two hundred passports times one hundred and ninety-nine destinations, every cell tagged with the source of truth, the date it was last verified, and the human or system that verified it. Roughly forty thousand rows that would have to be kept fresh forever. I did not appreciate, at the time, what a stupid thing I had committed to.

What the existing tools get wrong

The existing visa-checker tools fall into three buckets. The first are government portals — IATA's Timatic, the Schengen consular pages, embassy websites. They are correct, usually, but they are written for travel agents and immigration officers. They are not browsable. They are not multilingual in a meaningful way. They expect you to know which subcategory of visa you are looking for before you can find out whether you need one.

The second are aggregator widgets — the kind that ship on travel blogs and OTA sidebars. Most of them are scraping IATA quarterly, hard-coding the result into a JSON file, and shipping it to a CDN. The data is months out of date. The widget weighs 80 KB. There is no language coverage. They exist as lead magnets, not as honest products.

The third are AI chatbots — every general-purpose model gets asked visa questions a hundred million times a day. They hallucinate. They tell you Schengen is 90 days when it is 90 days in any 180-day rolling window. They tell you that the e-visa exists for a country where it was rolled back six months ago. They are confidently, smoothly wrong. That is the worst kind of wrong.

What we decided to build

We decided three things on day one and have not changed any of them. The first is that the data has to be the product. Not a feature of the product, not a layer on top of an LLM, not something we promise to keep fresh. The database — the forty thousand passport-destination pairs, every single one with a source URL and a verification timestamp — is the actual thing we are selling.

The second is that it has to be free at the point of use. A traveler typing in their passport country and a destination should never see a paywall. We make money on the developer API, on the embedded widgets, on the Chrome extension, and on premium guides that bundle visa information with budget, packing and weather data for specific trips. The bare check, the one piece of information that should never have been hard to find, is free.

The third is that we ship in every language a traveler might speak. Fifteen at launch — English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Russian, Arabic, Hindi, Thai, Vietnamese, Tagalog. The choice was not theoretical: it covers roughly four billion of the world's cross-border movements. If your audience is not in that list yet, it will be soon.

The first six months

The first six months were almost entirely about data ingestion. We wrote a Rust crawler that crosses every consular website on a weekly cadence, fingerprints the page structure, and flags any change in policy wording for human review. We hired two researchers who speak between them eleven of our launch languages, and we built an internal review tool that lets them confirm or reject a change in roughly forty seconds. When a change is confirmed, it propagates to the API, the widgets and the extension within ninety seconds — a freshness guarantee no one else in this space comes close to.

We learned things you can only learn by doing this. We learned that PDFs from the Indian Ministry of External Affairs are reliable but always two days behind the corresponding press release. We learned that the Saudi e-visa system updates its eligible-country list at 3 AM Riyadh time on Mondays. We learned that the Philippine Bureau of Immigration sometimes changes a fee structure and announces it only on a Facebook post. None of this is in IATA. None of this is in any LLM's training data. You have to actually watch.

What we believe about visas

We believe visa policy is downstream of trust, and that trust is changing. The last decade has been a slow unwinding of the assumption that any rich-country passport gets you in anywhere. Brexit, COVID, the rise of digital nomad visas, the proliferation of bilateral exemptions in Southeast Asia and the Gulf — the pattern is the same: more rules, more nuance, more conditions tied to residency or vaccination or employment. The amount of information a normal traveler is responsible for has gone up by an order of magnitude.

We believe most of the friction in cross-border movement is information friction, and that fixing information friction is more useful than complaining about the rules. The rules are what they are. They are set by sovereign governments, they reflect political compromises we do not get a vote on, and they will keep changing. The question is whether you have to spend three hours on Reddit threads to find out what they currently say.

We believe the people most punished by the current system are the ones with the least margin for error — the construction worker from Manila visiting his sister in Doha, the student from Lagos accepted to a program in Berlin, the grandmother from Mumbai flying to see her grandchildren in Toronto. These are the travelers who get turned back at check-in, who get pulled into secondary inspection, who lose money on non-refundable flights because nobody told them their passport needed six months of validity instead of three. Building for them is the work.

What comes next

We launched the Chrome extension last month. We launched the embedded widgets in March. The API has been quietly live since January and now serves roughly four million requests a day from developers we have never spoken to, which is the part of the business I am most proud of. The mobile app — the one that pulls visa, budget and packing into a single trip-planning surface — is in TestFlight and ships publicly this summer.

If you are reading this and you have ever stood in the wrong airport queue, missed a flight because of a six-month-validity rule, or paid $200 for an e-visa you did not need, I hope what we are building helps you the next time. If you are building software that touches travel and you want a partner who actually maintains the data, talk to us. If you are a researcher, a journalist, or a policymaker who cares about cross-border mobility, our database is open and our team will reply.

Visas are mostly a coordination problem. The rules are not going to get simpler. The least we can do is stop pretending the information about them is hard to find.