Sam Altman’s iris-scanning, identify-verification technology startup says it will begin expanding to the US starting May 1 and will launch a phone-like hardware device by next year. Those changes—and a promised World-branded debit card—signal the company’s ambitions to develop a “super app”—a goal shared by Elon Musk.
Altman and Alex Blania, a German physics researcher, announced at an event in San Francisco Wednesday evening that their venture-backed company, Tools for Humanity, is updating its “World” products to include a new, smaller, eye-scanning orb. The device-and-app combo scans people’s irises, creates a unique user ID, stores that information on the blockchain, and uses it as a form of identity verification. If enough people adopt the app globally, the thinking goes, it could ostensibly thwart scammers.
Altman has expressed concern about the amount of fakery that new AI tools will enable, including the generative AI tools pioneered by his other startup, OpenAI, which is valued at $300 billion. So the World app, and its hardware component, are Altman’s solution to the problem.
“Proving personhood” is a hard thing to productize, and whiffs of a scam have plagued the startup since it launched. The project has also been scrutinized by foreign governments for its biometric data-capture and storage policies. But Altman and Blania haven’t been deterred.
The bizarre identity verification process requires that users get their eyeballs scanned, so Tools for Humanity is expanding its physical footprint to make that a possibility. The company will open six Apple-like stores in cities across the US, including one in San Francisco, where the floor around a wooden structure holding about eight orbs was being polished on Wednesday night. The orbs will also be accessible in Razer stores. Future scanning sites could include cafes and college campuses, the company said.
World first launched as Worldcoin in July 2024, the brainchild of Altman, Blania, and Max Novendstern, who is no longer at the company. Blania serves as CEO, while Altman remains his most prominent backer. As of March 2025 the company had raised $240 million in venture capital funding from big-name firms like Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Bain Capital, and Coinbase Ventures, as well as individual investors like Reid Hoffman and the now-imprisoned Sam Bankman-Fried.
World’s network of users has “nearly doubled” in size in the last six months to roughly 26 million, the startup claims, and 12 million users have been verified with the orb. The company says it expects to generate revenue starting later this year through fees paid by apps that benefit from having users’ identities verified.
At the event on Wednesday—in a crowd filled with founders, engineers, and paid-to-attend-influencers—World said that it’s opening an Orb assembly line in Richardson, Texas with a US manufacturer, and estimates there will be a total of “7,500 orbs across the US by the end of this year.” But World wants to scale it beyond that, it said, and put more orbs “in the hands of the people.”
