Venice AI Joins the Unicorns With a $65M Raise

Venice AI, a privacy-first platform that routes user prompts through hundreds of AI models without storing any of the data, has raised a $65 million Series A at a $1 billion valuation — its first outside funding and enough to make it one of the newest unicorns in consumer AI. The round, reported by TechCrunch on Tuesday, July 1, was led by crypto-focused venture firm Dragonfly, with participation from Coinbase Ventures and North Island Ventures.

Founded in 2024 by Erik Voorhees — the entrepreneur behind crypto exchange ShapeShift — Venice pitches itself as the anti-surveillance alternative to mainstream chatbots. The platform offers access to more than 200 models spanning text, image, video, and audio: it hosts uncensored open-source models on its own data centers and routes queries to closed-source systems from providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Crucially, user input is encrypted and decrypted on the client side and passed through an external proxy before processing, so, the company says, no prompts or responses are ever stored on Venice's own systems. End-to-end encryption is offered on its paid tier.

The numbers behind the raise are unusually healthy for a two-year-old AI startup. Venice says it is already profitable, with more than 3 million active users, roughly 850,000 unique monthly website visitors, an average of 1.7 million API calls per day, and annualized run-rate revenue north of $70 million. That combination — real revenue, positive margins, and a first institutional check only now — is rare in a sector where most consumer AI apps burn cash to buy growth.

Crypto sits at the center of Venice's model, which explains Dragonfly's involvement. The company launched its VVV token in January and plans a second token, DIEM, in August; users can stake VVV to mint DIEM and generate roughly $1 per day in AI credits, and about 8% of customers already pay with cryptocurrency. The design ties the platform's economics to an on-chain incentive layer rather than a conventional subscription business alone.

Voorhees framed the bet in ideological terms. "We're optimizing for freedom and actually respecting users as adults, which is, I think, rare these days," he told TechCrunch — a jab at the content filters and data-retention practices that define most large chatbots. The funding is a wager that a meaningful slice of users will pay for private, unfiltered access to the same frontier models everyone else uses, precisely because Venice promises not to watch.