Orb ya later, bots: World's $52.5M raise bets humans still beat the machines 👁️

The World Foundation has raised $52.5 million to expand World ID, the "proof of human" system co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, betting that verifying human identity will only grow more critical as AI agents proliferate online. The nonprofit said Friday that the initial token sale was led by Pantera Capital and drew Bain Capital Crypto, Nasdaq-listed Eightco Holdings, Selini Capital, and Susquehanna Crypto, with all $WLD sold locked up for 12 months. The proceeds will fund the rollout of World ID to organizations, consumers, and their AI agents, the Foundation said. Pantera general partner Cosmo Jiang said "the need for Proof of Human is becoming acutely clear" as AI development accelerates.

World ID lets a person prove they are a unique human without revealing their identity, through a one-time iris scan at a spherical device called the Orb that generates an ID stored on their phone. The project, rebranded from Worldcoin in 2024, was co-founded by Altman to build a global "proof of personhood" system. The Foundation said the technology is being integrated this year with Zoom, Docusign, Okta, Vercel, and Tinder, alongside a new enterprise release, World ID 4.0, that lets outside developers build their own credentials into the system. The raise coincides with the project's third anniversary, which the Foundation marked by disclosing that more than 39 million people have joined the network, 18 million have been verified by an Orb, and World has processed 475 million ID proofs.

The iris-scanning model has drawn regulatory pushback across multiple jurisdictions. Hong Kong ordered the project to cease operations in 2024; a Kenyan court ordered it to delete users' biometric data; Brazil banned it from paying people for iris scans; Spain moved to halt its data collection; and South Korea fined the project $830,000 for privacy violations.

Institutional interest has continued regardless. Eightco, one of Friday's investors, built the first corporate $WLD treasury last year, and Grayscale this week filed an S-1 registration statement for the Grayscale Worldcoin Trust, moving to launch the first U.S. exchange-traded fund tied to the biometric crypto project. $WLD climbed about 8% over 24 hours following the filing to an intraday high of $0.387, trimming a rough week that still left it down around 5.5% over the past seven days, per CoinGecko data. Separately, Goldman Sachs Chairman and CEO David Solomon said, "I'm very supportive of moving the Clarity Act forward, so we can get some market structure in place and start to move the innovation process along," positioning the bank in favor of the crypto market-structure bill as it approaches a possible Senate floor vote.