World (Tools for Humanity)
World (Tools for Humanity) is a Decentralized Identity & Proof of Personhood company founded in 2019 and based in San Francisco, United States. It has raised $240M in total funding, most recently a Token / Strategic in 2025.
Tools for Humanity, founded in 2019 by Sam Altman, Alex Blania, and Max Novendstern, builds the technology behind World (formerly Worldcoin), a proof-of-personhood network. Users verify they are a unique human by having their iris scanned by a custom hardware device called the Orb, which generates a cryptographic World ID without storing the underlying biometric. Alex Blania is CEO and Sam Altman is chairman. The company has raised roughly $240 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Bain Capital Crypto, and Khosla Ventures, and the network has verified on the order of tens of millions of people as it expands US operations and rolls out a more compact Orb Mini.
World is the most prominent and best-funded attempt to build a global proof-of-personhood layer to tell humans from AI agents, making it the bellwether for the decentralized-identity category.
toolsforhumanity.com ↗·Decentralized Identity & Proof of Personhood·
United States·private 
