According to the Financial Times, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is close to raising around $100 million in funding for his Worldcoin cyrpto project. Markets Insider reports:
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.