Sam Altman’s Worldcoin raises $115 million in round led by Blockchain Capital

Tools for Humanity, the technology company behind Worldcoin, announced today that it has raised s$115 million in Series C funding led by Blockchain Capital. The funding will go towards a number of projects, including an alternative to the oft-maligned CAPTCHA test.

“There was this idea of ​​creating a new primitive for the internet that could enable any application to easily and quickly distinguish between machines and humans, or robots and humans,” said Blockchain Capital General Partner Spencer Bogart Decrypt in an interview. “It was something that took me working more closely with our engineering team to really appreciate how big of a problem it already is.”

Bots have been a thorn in the side of blockchain and cryptocurrency projects for a long time.

“[CAPTCHA] has been quite effective at distinguishing between robots and humans,” Bogart said. “That’s no longer the case with more advanced automated systems, especially things powered by AI.”

Other companies looking to combat the use of bots to defraud and cheat include Civic, which launched a suite of tools last summer to stop bots from taking unfair advantage of NFT drops by limiting the number of wallets an account can use.

While Bogart did not say how much Blockchain Capital invested in the round, other investors who joined the raise included a16z crypto, Bain Capital Crypto and Distributed Global. In addition to bot detection, Tools for Humanity says the funds will go towards research and development and expansion of the Worldcoin project and the World App.

San Francisco, California-based Tools for Humanity has a growing team that includes former employees of Electric Coin Company, Revolut, Uber, Block, Twitter and Apple.

The announcement of the increase comes a week after a report from Financial Times said Worldcoin co-founder and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was in “advanced talks” about a new funding round with an initial target of $100 million.

Currently in beta, Worldcoin is an Ethereum-based token designed to support something akin to a universal basic income for people around the world. The project aims to become the world’s largest and most inclusive identity and financial network, built around World ID and the Worldcoin token, with the ultimate goal of becoming a DAO-like entity with decentralized decision-making.

While Worldcoin says US citizens and those living in “other restricted areas” cannot receive Worldcoins, the company says it has brought in nearly two million users across five continents.

The project faced backlash almost immediately when the WorldID project announced that it would use retina scans to verify that the account holder was human and not a bot in a process called Proof of Personhood.

Tools for Humanity has said that the eyeball scans are destroyed once processed. Still, skeptics, including famed whistleblower Edward Snowden, aren’t ready to give a tech company that level of trust.

Despite its critics, Bogart says the team at Blockchain Capital has seen enough to be satisfied that Tools for Humanity will do what they said.

“Hopefully, [Worldcoin] can provide more information in an open nature that will give more people that certainty,” Bogart said. “That’s a big hurdle for them — it’s something they have to get over because ultimately people should be skeptical until they feel confident that it is actually a case.”