The picturesque center of Nuremberg, Germany, doesn’t usually have much going in the way of high-tech flair. It has a castle as well as cathedrals, placards celebrating bratwurst and seemingly endless rows of ice cream shops for tourists. On a weekday in mid-May, however, the city hosted some serious geek peacocking for those who were paying close attention.
Visitors to a future-themed retail store called Josephs, just off the main drag, found a mysterious-looking metallic orb the size of a cantaloupe. The Orb, with its shiny chrome finish, sat atop a black pole, which poked out of a large, rectangular wooden base, and this whole arrangement had been placed near one of the windows at the edge of Josephs’ main show floor. Not far from this odd object was Alex Blania, the Orb’s co-creator. He sat in a chair at the head of the room, where an interviewer peppered him with questions in front of dozens of German computer science and engineering students, who were celebrating Blania as the local boy made good.
Europe has a handful of major tech success stories, but it’s long trailed the US in terms of the quantity and quality of its ventures and the breadth of its entrepreneurial ambition. This is precisely why Blania had been put on display near his shiny sphere. He’s the chief executive officer of Tools for Humanity Corp., which uses the Orb as part of an identity verification and cryptocurrency system called Worldcoin. His company, based in San Francisco and Erlangen, Germany, is the ne plus ultra object of Silicon Valley yearning. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who started Tools for Humanity and recruited Blania, is a major financial backer, along with Tiger Global Management, Fifty Years, Khosla Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and dozens of other investors who’ve contributed more than $250 million to, as the company’s website says, “ensure a more just economic system.”
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