In the not-so-distant future, we are not going to know who is human and who is a droid, either behind a screen or, perhaps, standing right in front of us. That’s what investment firms like Pantera Capital believe. The $3.5 billion blockchain investor joined with four other key investors to raise $52.5 million for the World Foundation’s project to decipher humanity from bots and future cyborgs.

"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," Cosmo Jiang, a Pantera Capital General Partner, said in a statement on Friday. The investors argue that trust and reliability online is “on the verge of breaking.” 

World says they’ve built the only technology that enables individuals to prove they are human without revealing their identity. A one-time verification, performed by so called “World Operators” — comprised of independent business owners — using a large webcam-like device called the Orb which generates your World ID.

The World Foundation defines itself as a political and philosophical project that seeks to be part of the intellectual arguments and technological solutions in what some refer to as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The group also aligns with the World Economic Forum’s view of advanced technology in the new age, and with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

The $52.5 million is not the most interesting part of Friday’s announcement. The bigger story is that World is trying to turn proof of being human into a new layer of internet infrastructure. It’s an entire new investable segment of AI and Web3, let alone advanced humanoid robotics which are certain to take shape in the years ahead.

World Foundation is a nonprofit protocol steward, not a conventional startup looking for venture capitalists. Pantera was joined by Bain Capital Crypto, Eightco Holdings (NASDAQ:ORBS) and the others in purchasing locked WLD tokens, not equity in World Foundation or Tools for Humanity, the Sam Altman-backed company developing much of World’s technology. This is more of a strategic token sale, not a traditional venture round.

The market treated it as such. ORBS settled 6.3% lower on Friday.

"We’re excited to support the World Foundation’s continued growth," Tom Lee, Board Member of Eightco said in a statement. "World’s technology and proof of human variations are among the most important building blocks to secure and verify interactions in an increasingly digital driven world."

World Attempts To Solve New "AI Problem"

The old internet implicitly assumed that a person was behind an account, click, video call or signature. Generative AI and autonomous agents are destroying that assumption in the near term. Humanoids will destroy it in the future.

World’s pitch is not necessarily, "We can prove who you are." Their tech is more about proving a unique human is behind an account. World ID uses zero-knowledge proofs so an application can confirm that someone has a valid human credentials without requiring the person’s name, biometric images or underlying World ID. World says the credential is stored on the user’s phone and designed so activity cannot be tracked across applications, solving for things like real or fake dating profiles and social-media accounts; bot free ticket sales; digital signatures; online voting and governance; and deep fake protection for audio-visuals.

The Zoom (NASDAQ:ZM), Docusign (NASDAQ:DOCU), Tinder, Vercel and Okta (NASDAQ:OKTA) relationships show that World is moving beyond "crypto identity" toward practical consumer and enterprise applications. 

Proof of human is becoming an important part of the enterprise security stack, Docusign CEO Alan Thygesen said in a LinkedIn post in April. 

"We’re already seeing a proliferation of agent traffic across the internet, and certainly across Vercel," said Tom Occhino, Chief Product Officer at Vercel. "I think most developers, even those using coding agents, are going to want a way to verify it’s a human. For high-value, high-cost, high-trust actions, this is going to have to become ubiquitous for us to feel that the internet is still ours and that we can verify who we’re talking to," he said during the World Foundation’s Lift Off event in April, which was hosted by Altman.

Okta is developing a "Human Principal" product that could establish whether a human is the operator that runs an AI Agent, the company’s Chief Product Officer, Gareth Davies, said during Lift Off.

"We’re now seeing an explosion of AI agents that are rapidly outnumbering humans, and that creates a fundamentally different problem," Davies said. "How do we bind an agent’s identity to a human so the agent can only operate within the permissions that user has? Now we’re seeing more advanced patterns emerge: AI agents operating on behalf of teams and organizations. They’re spinning up fleets of these agents. That creates new risk and friction if we can’t understand who those agents are and safely connect them back to individuals and organizations."

This is the new story question for AI investors: are you human?

The Problems Deciphering Who is Real, Who is Not

AI is making intelligence abundant while making authenticated humanity a new market. World Foundation investors are betting that "proof of human" will become a standard digital credential, and that the protocol verifying humans and their authorized agents can become a revenue-producing infrastructure layer. 

Still, Tools for Humanity and World may be busy building and thinking about this new infrastructure the AI internet genuinely needs, but doing so will require consumers and regulators here and abroad to also trust biometric systems designed to establish anonymous humanity. 

Some 39 million people have joined the World Network, with more than 18 million humans verified by the Orb developed by Tools for Humanity, and running on Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) chips. The network claims more than 475 million World ID proofs have been verified since its launch, suggesting that the World ID credential is actually being used.

The writer is an investor in Eightco Holdings.

image credit: Author

Benzinga Disclaimer: This article is from an unpaid external contributor. It does not represent Benzinga’s reporting and has not been edited for content or accuracy.