Sam Altman’s Worldcoin raises $115M in Series C round

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Sam Alt­man has suc­cess­ful­ly raised $115 mil­lion in a Series C fund­ing round for World­coin, Reuters report­ed May 25.

Blockchain Cap­i­tal led the raise, with Andreessen Horowitz, Bain Cap­i­tal Cryp­to, and Dis­trib­uted Glob­al join­ing the round as well.

The Ope­nAI CEO launched World­coin in 2021 with the ambi­tious goal of dis­trib­ut­ing cryp­tocur­ren­cy to every per­son on earth (except for U.S. res­i­dents) “just for being a unique individual.”

How­ev­er, the project is con­tro­ver­sial for its reliance on a pro­pri­etary device that scans indi­vid­u­als’ iris­es to ver­i­fy their iden­ti­ty. Once iden­ti­ty ver­i­fi­ca­tion is com­plete, tokens are dis­trib­uted free of charge. The project’s team describes this as a nov­el way to ver­i­fy unique­ness while ensur­ing pri­va­cy and insists the iris scans are destroyed.

Not every­one is con­vinced, how­ev­er. Notably, Edward Snow­den, for­mer U.S. intel­li­gence con­trac­tor and promi­nent pri­va­cy advo­cate, crit­i­cized the con­cept. “Don’t cat­a­logue eye­balls,” he tweet­ed in response to Altman’s tweet intro­duc­ing the project in 2021 while rais­ing doubts con­cern­ing its sincerity.

The cap­i­tal raise comes at a piv­otal time for the cryp­to space, which is still recov­er­ing from a bru­tal down­turn and series of implo­sions that char­ac­ter­ized 2022.

Alt­man, also the chief exec­u­tive of Ope­nAI, the firm behind Chat­G­PT, is a promi­nent fig­ure in the AI field. On May 16, he made head­lines by tes­ti­fy­ing before a U.S. Sen­ate sub­com­mit­tee that AI tech­nolo­gies had arrived at the point of demand­ing gov­ern­ment over­sight to ensure respon­si­ble development.

The post Sam Altman’s World­coin rais­es $115M in Series C round appeared first on Cryp­toSlate.

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