Sam Altman's eye-scanning startup is bleeding high-level employees

• Two C-suite executives and several senior staff have departed Tools for Humanity in recent months.
• Adrian Ludwig, Chief Architect, and Damien Kieran, Chief Legal and Privacy Officer, have both left.
• A former employee said that challenges with culture and leadership contributed to the departures.

Two C-suite executives and several senior staff have departed Tools for Humanity, the Sam Altman-founded startup behind the eyeball-scanning "Orb," in recent months, Business Insider has learned.

Adrian Ludwig, the Chief Information Security Officer and Chief Architect, recently left after a two-year stint, according to two people and a LinkedIn review. He previously worked at firms including Alphabet, Atlassian, and Adobe.

Damien Kieran, Chief Legal and Privacy Officer for the past year and a half also recently announced his departure in a LinkedIn post. His previous roles included general counsel at the photo-sharing app BeReal and chief privacy officer at Twitter, leaving after Elon Musk took over the platform. His hiring at the Altman startup was widely covered in the summer of 2024.

Kieran said in the post that he plans to spend his time off training for an Ironman, earning his pilot's license, and riding his motorcycles.

Ludwig and Kieran declined requests for comment.

Their exits follow a slew of other high-level departures: the head of protocol and applied research, the head of people, the head of talent, and the head of people operations have left the company in recent months, according to former employees and a review of LinkedIn. A former employee added that the company's data protection officer left in November. The head of device product and a lawyer who, according to LinkedIn, joined in September, also submitted their notices, the former employee said.

Business Insider reviewed an internal Slack message in the company's #team-chat channel in which CEO Alex Blania described leadership changes, including the appointment of five interim positions. That included an interim head of market operations, interim head of operational partnerships, interim head of people, interim general counsel, and interim head of protocol.

"Only exceptional impact, commitment, extreme work ethic, and mission alignment will be sufficient to succeed in our team," Blania wrote. "If that's not for you, that is okay. But in fairness to all other team members, this might not be the right place to be."

One former employee who recently left the company said that challenges with company culture and leadership contributed to the departures.

A Tools for Humanity spokesperson told Business Insider that, "each departure is unique and we wish our former colleagues the best."

"At a time when the distinction between AI and humans online blurs more each day, we've aligned our team around our increasingly urgent mission to help humanity make those distinctions," she said.

The rash of exits at Tools for Humanity comes as Altman and Blania turn their attention to a new venture they co-founded, Merge Labs, to develop brain-computer interfaces.

As Business Insider previously reported, Tools for Humanity has raised hundreds of millions of dollars to try and scan the world's eyeballs in order to verify users' identities. Along the way, it's struggled to win over international regulators, and former employees expressed concern over its long-term strategy.

The company has also faced scrutiny over its hardcore company culture, after Business Insider reported that Blania told staffers to work weekends and not care about anything outside of work.

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