Merge Labs Funding and Collaboration

Alex Blania (CEO of Tools for Humanity, Co-Founder of World, and Co-Founder of Merge Labs) joins Sourcery to explain why the internet is heading toward a breaking point: bots, deepfakes, scams, and autonomous agents are scaling faster than trust.

“99.9% of internet traffic will be AI driven.”

“It’s not about combating the bots because that will be a lost cause.”

World is trying to build a “real human network” a proof-of-human layer for the AI era, and the numbers are getting serious:

• 38,374,194 World App users across 160 countries

• 17,832,402 verified unique humans

• 970,885,726 wallet transactions

We talk about: how proof-of-human actually works, what happens when bots outnumber people online, why identity becomes the bottleneck for markets and platforms, and what a “verified human internet” could look like.

Then we go deeper into Alex’s second frontier bet: Merge Labs, a brain–computer interface research lab that raised $252M seed round at an $850M valuation, backed by Bain Capital Ventures, with OpenAI as an investor and research collaborator, plus Gabe Newell. Merge Labs is pursuing less-invasive, higher-bandwidth BCIs, exploring ultrasound-based modalities and molecular approaches to interface with more of the brain without implants.

The bot era is here. The question is: how do you prove you’re human online, and what happens when you can’t?

Alex Blania: ⁠https://x.com/alexblania⁠

Molly O’Shea: ⁠⁠https://x.com/MollySOShea⁠⁠

Sourcery: ⁠⁠https://x.com/sourceryvc⁠

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YouTube: ⁠https://youtu.be/7PnaQzw_K8E⁠

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𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

(00:00) Alex Blania

(01:27) World Explained: ID, Chain, App — The Full Stack

(04:47) World Card, Stablecoins & Encrypted World Chat

(08:22) 37M Users, 17M Verified — And It’s Still Not Enough

(11:02) “Fail-Safe Privacy” — Why This Can’t Break

(12:18) Where Proof of Human Actually Wins: Social, Dating, Gaming

(14:04) Stop Fighting Bots — Label AI vs Human

(16:49) How Alex Met Sam Altman

(22:25) Operating with Sam While Building Two Companies

(24:39) Inside Merge Labs — Why It Took 18 Months

(24:58) “Last Innings Before Superintelligence”

(32:38) Launching Merge Labs – $252M Seed Round

(34:01) OpenAI Funding

(37:30) Brain–Computer Interfaces 101 — Why Bandwidth Matters

(42:14) Mind Control? Privacy? The Real BCI Misconceptions