United StatesAlex Blania
Alex Blania is a German entrepreneur and physicist who co-founded Merge Labs in 2025 with Sam Altman and serves as its CEO, leading day-to-day operations of the OpenAI-backed brain-computer interface lab. He is best known as co-founder and CEO of Tools for Humanity, the company behind World (formerly Worldcoin), which he started with Altman in 2019 and where he led development of the Orb iris-biometric identity device; World has since grown to tens of millions of verified users across 160+ countries. Born circa 1994 near Nuremberg, Blania earned dual bachelor's degrees in physics and industrial engineering from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and pursued graduate physics research, including deep-learning and quantum-information work associated with Caltech, before leaving to build World. At Merge Labs he applies that AI-and-deep-tech background to the pursuit of non-invasive, high-bandwidth neural interfaces.