Privacy-focused AI company Venice AI becomes a unicorn with $65M Series A
Venice AI, which provides access to more than 200 AI models while protecting user privacy, has raised a $65 million Series A at a $1 billion valuation, marking its first external funding round and unicorn status.
Privacy-focused AI is paying off. Venice AI, founded just two years ago, has already achieved significant traction: over 850,000 unique website visitors, 3 million active users, and an average of 1.7 million API calls per day. The company is profitable, with annualized run-rate revenues exceeding $70 million.
This week, Venice AI announced a $65 million Series A funding round led by crypto-focused venture firm Dragonfly, with participation from Coinbase Ventures and North Island Ventures. This is the company's first external fundraising, and it values the startup at $1 billion.
Venice AI offers access to "uncensored" open-source models hosted on its own data centers, and also routes queries to closed-source models like those from OpenAI or Anthropic. All user input is encrypted and decrypted client-side, then routed through an external proxy before processing, with no data stored on Venice's systems. End-to-end encryption is available on some models but requires a paid subscription.
CEO Erik Voorhees, a long-time privacy advocate and founder of crypto companies like Satoshi Dice and ShapeShift, emphasizes that Venice AI treats its service as a neutral tool, much like Bitcoin. According to him, the team optimizes for freedom and treats users as adults, which is rare today.
To attract users, Venice AI launched two crypto tokens: "VVV" in January 2024 and "DIEM" in August 2023. Users can buy VVV and stake it to mint DIEM, which generates $1 worth of AI credits per day. However, only about 8% of users pay with cryptocurrency.
Looking ahead, Venice AI plans to use the fresh capital to purchase GPUs and build its own data centers, moving away from leasing computing power to improve gross margins.
