OpenAI chief Sam Altman is close to raising $100 million for his eyeball-scanning Worldcoin crypto project, report says
- Sam Altman is close to raising $100 million for Worldcoin, according to the Financial Times.
- The start-up wants to give people cryptocurrency in exchange for scans of their eyes.
OpenAI boss Sam Altman is close to raising around $100 million in funding for his Worldcoin crypto project, according to a report.
Worldcoin is in advanced talks to raise the cash from both new and existing investors ahead of a potential launch within the next few weeks, the Financial Times said Sunday, citing three people with knowledge of the deal.
The startup wants to use eyeball-scanning technology to create a digital identification system that would give people across the globe access to a free crypto token called Worldcoin.
It's previously received backing from Andreessen Horowitz's crypto fund, Coinbase's VC arm Coinbase Ventures, and FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.
Worldcoin pulled in $100 million from investors last year through a token sale that valued the company at around $3 billion, according to a report by The Information from March 2022.
That fundraising effort came before a bruising period for crypto in which flagship tokens like bitcoin and ether cratered in price and high-profile companies including Bankman-Fried's FTX collapsed.
"It's a bear market, a crypto winter. It's remarkable for a project in this space to get this amount of investment," one of the FT's sources told the publication.
Altman rose to prominence when he became president of the startup accelerator Y Combinator in 2014, which made him a well-known figure in Silicon Valley.
In 2015 he cofounded OpenAI with Tesla and SpaceX boss Elon Musk, and he is currently the company's CEO.
During Altman's time as CEO, OpenAI has released popular generative AI tools including ChatGPT and DALL-E to the public.
Worldcoin didn't immediately respond to Insider's request for comment, sent outside normal working hours.