Our story
Measuring the cause used to require a laboratory. Now it can be done outside the laboratory.
The Portal existed for nearly two decades before the technology existed to make it an instrument. What began as a question about human agency became the most controlled physiological measurement system outside a laboratory. This is the story of both.
The same engineering rigor that reads an F1 car’s nervous system, applied to yours.
The Portal’s controlled environment was engineered with McLaren, to the standard where the goal is not good enough data: it is decision-grade data. Every condition held, every signal captured, every measurement exists to produce one thing: a decision that can be defended.
The founding question
I did not want to remain a reactive participant in my own life.
LEE MCCORMACK · FOUNDER & CEO
For most of his working life, Lee McCormack has been trying to answer one question: how much of who we become is consciously chosen, and how much is simply inherited from our surroundings, our upbringing, and the patterns we absorb before we are old enough to question them.
He spent years studying psychology, semiology, anthropology, and meditation, looking for practical ways to understand those influences. He kept arriving at the same limitation: it is very hard to observe yourself clearly while the environment around you is continually acting on you.
This was happening just as the world was wiring itself for constant connection. Personal space was disappearing exactly when he had begun to understand why it mattered. So while almost everyone around him was designing for greater connectivity, he began building the opposite: a fully controlled environment that could reduce external influence and return control to the individual.
That environment became the Portal. Over many thousands of sessions across a wide range of people, the decisive realisation came. A space controlled enough to support honest self-observation is also controlled enough to support objective measurement: not what a person reports feeling, but what their physiology actually does.
The control was never only protecting the individual from distraction. It was the instrument.
Built by
Leaders in engineering, elite sport, and institutional performance.
Led by Lee McCormack, Founder & CEO — alongside a team with roots in McLaren Applied, elite sport, and spatial computing.