Pantera Capital led the first close of a WLD sale that the foundation says will push its iris-scanning “proof of human” ID toward enterprises, consumers, and AI agents.
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Posted July 24, 2026 at 4:51 pm EST.
The World Foundation, the nonprofit steward of the Sam Altman co-founded identity project once known as Worldcoin, said Friday it raised an initial $52.5 million in a token sale to strategic investors, with every WLD token in the round locked up for a year.
Pantera Capital led the first close, according to a press release, joined by Bain Capital Crypto, Eightco Holdings, Selini Capital, Susquehanna Crypto and other backers. The foundation said the full 12-month lockup signals a long-term bet rather than a quick flip, and that the money will go toward pushing World ID, its “proof of human” verification system, to organizations, consumers and their AI agents.
A bet on the agentic web
World’s pitch is that as AI agents flood the internet, platforms will need a dependable way to tell people apart from machines. Its answer is a one-time iris scan at a physical device called the Orb, which generates an ID that proves someone is a unique human without exposing who they are.
“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,” said Cosmo Jiang, a general partner at Pantera Capital, in a statement. The foundation said World ID is being wired into platforms including Zoom, Docusign, Okta, Vercel and Tinder this year, and pointed to the enterprise-focused World ID 4.0 it released earlier in 2026.
Scaling as the token lags
The raise landed on the three-year anniversary of World’s July 2023 production launch, a stretch in which the network grew to more than 39 million members and over 18 million Orb-verified humans. It also follows the $135 million World sold to Andreessen Horowitz and Bain Capital Crypto in May 2025, when the network counted 26 million users.
Investors committed even as WLD trades around $0.37, roughly 97% below its March 2024 peak.
Tom Lee, a board member of Eightco, the Nasdaq-listed company that holds more than 283 million WLD, said in the release that World’s technology is “among the most important building blocks to secure and verify interactions in an increasingly digital driven world.”
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