Venice AI just raised $65 million and became a billion dollar company on a pitch that runs against the habits of the biggest AI labs: don't keep what the user typed.
Erik Voorhees has spent more than a decade building companies around the same blunt idea. A middleman watching every transaction is a problem, not a feature. First came Satoshi Dice, the bitcoin gambling site. Then ShapeShift, the exchange that let people swap crypto without opening an account. Now, with Venice AI, he's applying that old crypto instinct to chatbots.
According to TechCrunch, Venice closed a $65 million Series A led by Dragonfly, with Coinbase Ventures and North Island Ventures also in the round. The deal values the company at $1 billion and marks its first outside fundraise since Voorhees founded it two years ago. That is a fast climb, but the valuation isn't the part you should notice first.
Venice is already profitable. Voorhees told TechCrunch the company is running above $70 million in annualized revenue, before taking a dollar of venture money. In AI, where rented GPUs can eat a business before the revenue line has time to look impressive, that detail matters more than the unicorn label.
The product is easy to explain and hard to run. Venice gives users access to more than 200 AI models, combining open source systems that Venice hosts in its own data centers with routed queries to closed models from OpenAI and Anthropic. User input is encrypted on the client side, sent through an outside proxy, processed, and returned, with Venice saying it doesn't store the prompt afterward. TechCrunch reported that the site draws more than 850,000 unique visitors, serves more than 3 million active users, and handles about 1.7 million API calls a day.
You don't get that traction by being merely private. Venice also sells itself as uncensored, meaning it won't refuse prompts in the same way ChatGPT or Claude might under their safety policies. That is the more combustible half of the pitch. OpenAI and Anthropic put guardrails in their products because they have watched public blowups turn into regulatory questions and brand risk. Venice is betting there are enough users, businesses, and developers building autonomous agents who want fewer restrictions and are willing to pay for a service that won't keep a record of the prompt.
The investor list tells you who believes that bet. Dragonfly and Coinbase Ventures aren't simply AI funds hunting for the next foundation model. They're crypto investors backing a founder who already speaks their language and already launched a token around the product. In January, Voorhees introduced VVV on Coinbase's Base network. The token has a hard cap of 100 million, and half went through an airdrop to roughly 100,000 Venice users and AI community projects.
Stake VVV and you can mint DIEM, a second token that generates a dollar's worth of Venice AI credits each day you hold it. Call it a loyalty program with token rails. Frankly, it is also a very crypto way to solve the expensive problem every consumer AI company faces: getting users to show up without spending a fortune on conventional marketing.
Voorhees says the new money is going into hardware, not a hiring spree. Venice currently leases GPUs. The plan now is to buy them and begin building its own data centers, which would give the company more control over the cost of serving those millions of API calls. That isn't the shiny part of the story, but it is the part that protects the profit Voorhees is pointing to.
The timing is not accidental. Regulators are pressing AI companies on user data, model training, retention, and safety, while founders are looking for angles that don't require outcompeting OpenAI on raw model quality. Here is the thing: the fear that your prompt might be stored, reviewed, or used later was always going to create a market for the opposite promise. Venice has turned that promise into revenue.
The harder question is whether the same pitch that attracts users also attracts trouble. A private AI assistant is easy to defend. An uncensored AI platform is a harder sell once regulators start asking what happens when the tool is used badly and no one kept the record. Crypto investors may be comfortable with that trade. Governments usually aren't.
For now, Venice has something many AI startups don't: real revenue, a profitable business, and a story that doesn't depend on next year's model making this year's spending look sensible. That is why the funding round matters. The company isn't just asking the market to believe in privacy as a principle. It is showing that some users will pay for it.
Also read: Cisco is betting its whole workforce on AI agents while it cuts jobs • Meta Is Quietly Building a Business to Sell Its Leftover AI Computing Power • Twelve Labs raises $100 million as Amazon bets its Trainium chips on video AI
