Venice AI vaults to unicorn status with $65M

Venice AI, a privacy-first platform routing queries across more than 200 AI models, has raised a $65 million Series A at a $1 billion valuation. The funding backs its “uncensored” approach, encrypted processing flow, and plans to build its own data centers.

On the day Venice AI announced its Series A, the pitch wasn’t about faster chatbots or shinier demos. It was about control—what can be asked, what gets stored, and who gets watched.

The startup. which gives users access to more than 200 AI models while keeping their privacy. says it has grown fast enough to earn unicorn status. Two years after launch. Venice AI has more than 850. 000 unique visitors to its website. serves more than 3 million active users. and averages 1.7 million API calls per day. It also claims it is already profitable, with annualized run-rate revenues of over $70 million.

Now it’s turning that momentum into a major round. Venice AI said Wednesday it raised a $65 million Series A at a $1 billion valuation—its first external fundraise. The round was led by Dragonfly, a crypto-focused venture firm, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, North Island Ventures, and others.

The mechanics of Venice AI’s pitch are built for the exact fears surrounding modern AI—harassment. disinformation. mental health impacts. and questions of personal safety. Venice’s answer is an architecture designed to keep user inputs away from its own systems. It hosts “uncensored. ” open source models on its own data centers and routes queries to closed-source models. including those by OpenAI or Anthropic. It says all user input is encrypted and unencrypted client-side. routed through an external proxy before being processed and returned. and that no data is stored on Venice’s own systems.

For some models, Venice also provides end-to-end encryption—but that feature requires a subscription.

The company’s growth has been loud enough to pull in investors whose interest doesn’t stop at privacy. CEO Erik Voorhees, known for a long-running focus on privacy and crypto, told TechCrunch during an exclusive interview that the service’s traction reflects demand for both access and agency.

The overlap between Voorhees’ background and Venice’s new crypto backers is hard to miss. Voorhees is an early bitcoin advocate who has founded crypto companies including the bitcoin gambling site Satoshi Dice and the cryptocurrency exchange ShapeShift. and he has long pushed for preserving users’ privacy. When a Wall Street Journal investigation accused ShapeShift—initially a service that didn’t require users to identify themselves—of processing millions of suspect funds. Voorhees reportedly said: “I don’t think people should have their identity recorded to catch an occasional criminal.”.

That same attitude comes through in how he frames Venice AI’s stance on safety. Asked about how the platform thinks about offering access to AI models in light of recent cases of AI psychosis and the harm that followed. Voorhees said his team treats its service as a “neutral tool or a neutral platform.”.

He added: “This is the same principle that you have in Bitcoin. where Bitcoin. as a neutral protocol. works the same way for all people.” He continued: “I think it’s actually quite dangerous from a safety perspective. for the world to enter this next phase and have everyone be constantly watched. To me that is actually much more dangerous than any particular person asking a controversial question or something that might be considered bad.”.

Venice’s promise of control isn’t only about encryption. It also centers on choice. Users can freely select from AI models that generate text. images. audio. and video—models that vary in performance. quality. and the amount of censorship applied. The website highlights customizable AI “characters” that users can chat with, and the company states it offers an “uncensored” experience.

“We’re optimizing for freedom and actually respecting users as adults, which is, I think, rare these days,” Voorhees said.

He also said Venice works on some open models’ system prompts to encourage them to answer more openly, while not adding restrictions to the models.

Tokenization runs alongside that freedom story. Venice launched a token called “VVV” in early January to attract users, Voorhees said. In August last year. it added another token called “DIEM.” Users can buy VVV and stake it to mint DIEM. which generates $1 worth of AI credits per day that users can spend on Venice. Even with the crypto layer, Voorhees said only about 8% of the company’s users pay with crypto.

Still, he credited the company’s growth partly to the crypto tokens’ performance. But the bigger driver, he said, was narrowing the gap with ChatGPT’s capabilities. When Venice launched, it was far behind what ChatGPT could do; people, he said, used it because it was private. Now, he said, it’s “very close” to feature parity.

“So as we’ve closed that gap, it’s become an increasingly compelling alternative,” he said, describing Venice as it gets closer to the experience users already expect.

With the $65 million Series A, Venice plans to buy GPUs and build its own data centers, aiming to stop leasing GPUs and increase its gross margins.

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