Alex Blania

Alex Blania is the co-founder and CEO of Tools for Humanity, the company building World (formerly Worldcoin), which he started in 2019 with Sam Altman and Max Novendstern. A German native who studied physics and industrial engineering at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and researched neural networks and theoretical physics at the Max Planck Institute and Caltech, he left his studies to build a global proof-of-personhood and financial network. He led the design of the Orb, the iris-scanning biometric device at the heart of the World ID protocol, and has become the public face of the project as it navigated a high-profile launch, tens of millions of sign-ups, and sustained regulatory and privacy scrutiny. In 2025 he was named to the TIME 100 list of the most influential people in AI, and he also co-founded Merge Labs, a brain-computer interface company backed by OpenAI.

8 talks by Alex Blania