Venice AI has demonstrated a way to offer AI access while prioritizing user privacy — and has drawn investor interest in the process. The company said it raised $65 million in a Series A round, its first external financing; the round was led by crypto-focused venture firm Dragonfly, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, North Island Ventures, and others. The funding values the company at about $1 billion.
How the platform works and user metrics
In two years Venice AI reports more than 850,000 unique website visitors, over 3 million active users, and an average of 1.7 million API calls per day. The startup provides access to more than 200 AI models: it hosts uncensored, open-source models in its own data centers and routes queries to closed-source models such as those from OpenAI or Anthropic.
According to the company, all user input is encrypted and decrypted client-side, then passed through an external proxy before processing and returning; Venice says it does not store data on its own systems. The platform offers end-to-end encryption for some models, although that capability requires a paid subscription.
Financials and growth
Venice says it is already profitable and has an annualized run-rate revenue of more than $70 million. CEO Erik Voorhees told TechCrunch that growth has been driven partly by the platform’s privacy promise and increasingly by functional parity: when Venice launched it lagged behind ChatGPT, but as the gap has closed the service has become a more compelling alternative.
Philosophy: neutrality and user agency
Venice markets an “uncensored” experience: users can choose from models that generate text, images, audio, and video, each of which differs in performance, quality, and the degree of censorship applied. The site features customizable AI “characters” that people can chat with.
Erik Voorhees — an early bitcoin advocate and founder of crypto companies including Satoshi Dice and ShapeShift — frames the service as a neutral tool. He compares the approach to Bitcoin as a neutral protocol and has argued against pervasive surveillance, saying constant monitoring could be more dangerous from a safety perspective than individuals asking controversial questions.
Crypto tokens and payments
Two crypto tokens are tied to the project. Venice launched a token called “VVV” in early January and added another called “DIEM” in August last year. Users can buy VVV and stake it to mint DIEM; DIEM generates $1 worth of AI credits per day usable on Venice. Despite these options, Voorhees said roughly 8% of the company’s users pay with crypto.
Next steps: buy GPUs and build data centers
Venice plans to use the new capital to acquire GPUs and construct its own data centers so it can stop leasing GPUs and improve gross margins. The move is intended to lower costs and give the company greater operational control.
Why this matters
Venice AI highlights a segment of the market that wants powerful AI capabilities without surrendering privacy to large tech companies. Investors, including crypto-focused funds, have backed that demand — and Venice’s combination of privacy-oriented routing, a wide model catalog, and growing functional parity with mainstream offerings helped it secure a $1 billion valuation.
