World Foundation raises $52 million in token sale as proof-of-human demand accelerates

World Foundation has raised $52 million through a locked token sale to expand the reach of World ID, its iris-scan-based system for proving someone is a real human online. Pantera Capital led the initial close, joined by Bain Capital Crypto, Eightco Holdings, Selini Capital, and Susquehanna Crypto, with all WLD tokens sold subject to a 12-month lockup. The fundraise lands on the third anniversary of the project’s launch and follows a $135 million token sale led by Andreessen Horowitz and Bain Capital Crypto in May 2025.

The capital will fund World ID’s expansion into enterprise platforms that are already integrating the technology. Zoom began using World’s Deep Face verification in April to prove meeting participants are human, displaying a “Verified Human” badge when a live video feed matches a user’s iris-scanned biometric profile. Docusign, Okta, Vercel, and Tinder have also signed integration deals, each addressing a different vector of the same problem: bots and deepfakes eroding trust on digital platforms.

World ID works by having users visit a physical Orb device that scans their iris and generates a unique cryptographic credential stored on their phone. The system uses zero-knowledge proofs and what World calls anonymised multi-party computation to verify someone is a unique human without revealing their identity. More than 39 million people have joined the World Network to date, with more than 18 million verified through an Orb across 160 countries.

The project, originally conceived by Sam Altman, Max Novendstern, and Alex Blania, has faced sustained regulatory pushback over its biometric data collection. Spain ordered the company to halt iris scanning in 2024 over privacy concerns, and Germany’s data regulator mandated the deletion of iris data later that year. Kenya, Hong Kong, Argentina, and the Philippines have all taken enforcement action against the project, citing issues ranging from insufficient consent to the use of cryptocurrency incentives to recruit participants in lower-income communities.

World Foundation says the new funding will also support World ID version four, an enterprise-ready upgrade that lets third-party developers build their own credentials into the system’s zero-knowledge proof stack. The timing reflects a bet that the same AI systems making bots indistinguishable from humans will force platforms to adopt proof-of-human infrastructure, though the gap between enterprise demand for verified identity and the regulatory resistance to how World collects that identity remains the central tension the project has yet to resolve.