Sam Altman’s Eye-Scanning Orb Is Now Coming to the US | EUROtoday

Sam Altman’s iris-scanning, identify-verification expertise startup says it’ll start increasing to the US beginning May 1 and can launch a phone-like {hardware} gadget by subsequent 12 months. Those modifications—and a promised World-branded debit card—sign the corporate’s ambitions to develop a “super app”—a aim shared by Elon Musk.

Altman and Alex Blania, a German physics researcher, introduced at an occasion in San Francisco Wednesday night that their venture-backed firm, Tools for Humanity, is updating its “World” merchandise to incorporate a brand new, smaller, eye-scanning orb. The device-and-app combo scans individuals’s irises, creates a singular person ID, shops that info on the blockchain, and makes use of it as a type of id verification. If sufficient individuals undertake the app globally, the pondering goes, it may ostensibly thwart scammers.

Altman has expressed concern concerning the quantity of fakery that new AI instruments will allow, together with the generative AI instruments pioneered by his different startup, OpenAI, which is valued at $300 billion. So the World app, and its {hardware} element, are Altman’s resolution to the issue.

“Proving personhood” is a tough factor to productize, and whiffs of a rip-off have plagued the startup because it launched. The mission has additionally been scrutinized by international governments for its biometric data-capture and storage insurance policies. But Altman and Blania haven’t been deterred.

The weird id verification course of requires that customers get their eyeballs scanned, so Tools for Humanity is increasing its bodily footprint to make {that a} risk. The firm will open six Apple-like shops in cities throughout the US, together with one in San Francisco, the place the ground round a picket construction holding about eight orbs was being polished on Wednesday night time. The orbs may even be accessible in Razer shops. Future scanning websites may embody cafes and faculty campuses, the corporate stated.

World first launched as Worldcoin in July 2024, the brainchild of Altman, Blania, and Max Novendstern, who’s now not on the firm. Blania serves as CEO, whereas Altman stays his most outstanding backer. As of March 2025 the corporate had raised $240 million in enterprise capital funding from big-name corporations like Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Bain Capital, and Coinbase Ventures, in addition to particular person buyers like Reid Hoffman and the now-imprisoned Sam Bankman-Fried.

World’s community of customers has “nearly doubled” in measurement within the final six months to roughly 26 million, the startup claims, and 12 million customers have been verified with the orb. The firm says it expects to generate income beginning later this 12 months via charges paid by apps that profit from having customers’ identities verified.

At the occasion on Wednesday—in a crowd stuffed with founders, engineers, and paid-to-attend-influencers—World stated that it’s opening an Orb meeting line in Richardson, Texas with a US producer, and estimates there shall be a complete of “7,500 orbs across the US by the end of this year.” But World desires to scale it past that, it stated, and put extra orbs “in the hands of the people.”