World Foundation Raises $52 Million as AI Drives Demand for ID Solutions

World Foundation raised $52.5 million in new funding to bring World ID technology to organizations, consumers and artificial intelligence (AI) agents.

The organization raised the new funding by selling to strategic investors WLD tokens that are subject to a one-year lockup, it said in a Friday (July 24) press release.

World Foundation is the independent nonprofit steward of the World protocol and aims to transition it to an open, decentralized protocol, expand community participation, and make the protocol economically self-sustaining through protocol fees paid by applications, according to the release.

The need for World ID infrastructure is accelerating with the expansion of AI, per the release.

“World has built the only technology that enables individuals to prove they are unique humans without revealing their identity,” the organization said in the release.

More than 18 million humans have been verified by the technology, more than 475 million World ID proofs have been utilized, and World ID is being integrated with communications, identity, authentication and dating platforms, according to the release.

The first close of the new funding was led by Pantera Capital.

Cosmo Jiang, general partner at Pantera Capital, said in the release: “The need for Proof of Human is becoming acutely clear with the acceleration of AI development, and we see this in the influx of enterprise traction. We’re excited to continue supporting World’s mission at this inflection point in its growth.”

World and Coinbase announced in March that they collaborated to introduce a solution for the agentic web that provides proof that agents have a human behind them. The AgentKit beta developer toolkit allows verified humans to delegate their World ID to AI agents so that these agents can have an added layer of trust for interactions and transactions.

In February, it was reported that Tools for Humanity was partnering with well-known brands to promote World ID.

Tools for Humanity uses a device called an Orb to take pictures of a person’s face and eyes, converts those images into a string of numbers stored on the person’s device, and enables the person to use that World ID to prove that they are human.