Venice AI becomes unicorn with $65M Series A, $70M run-rate

Venice AI said on Wednesday it raised a $65 million Series A at a $1 billion valuation as its privacy-first platform scales, the company told TechCrunch. The two-year-old startup says it serves more than 3 million active users, records an average of 1.7 million API calls per day, and has annualized run-rate revenues of over $70 million.

What did Venice AI announce?

Venice AI announced a $65 million Series A that values the company at $1 billion and is its first external fundraise; the round was led by Dragonfly with participation from Coinbase Ventures, North Island Ventures, and others. The company said the money will be used to buy GPUs and build its own data centers so it can stop leasing GPUs and improve gross margins.

The CEO, Erik Voorhees, also told TechCrunch the company is already profitable and credited growth to getting closer to feature parity with ChatGPT while preserving privacy as a differentiator. The startup says it has more than 200 AI models available and more than 850,000 unique website visitors since launch.

How does Venice AI protect user privacy and how big is its usage?

Venice AI routes user queries through an external proxy and says all user input is encrypted client-side before processing, with no data stored on Venice’s own systems; it also provides end-to-end encryption on some models behind a subscription. The company hosts “uncensored,” open source models in its own data centers and routes queries to closed-source models such as those by OpenAI or Anthropic.

On scale, Venice says it serves more than 3 million active users and averages 1.7 million API calls per day. The startup reported annualized run-rate revenues of over $70 million and described itself as profitable. Only about 8 percent of users pay with crypto, despite Venice offering two tokens: VVV, launched in early January, and DIEM, added in August last year; users can stake VVV to mint DIEM, which generates $1 worth of AI credits per day.

Why does Venice AI frame itself as a privacy-first, less-censored alternative?

Venice’s CEO framed the product as a neutral platform and compared that neutrality to Bitcoin’s protocol design, arguing broad surveillance is a greater safety risk than permitting controversial queries. Voorhees said the company treats its service as a “neutral tool or a neutral platform.” He comes from a long crypto background, including founding ShapeShift, and the company’s investor mix includes crypto-focused funds, an alignment visible in Venice’s token strategy and privacy stance.

The company emphasizes user agency: customers can choose models for text, images, audio, and video that vary in performance and censorship levels, and Venice works on some open models’ system prompts to make them answer more openly while not adding restrictions to the models themselves.

What to watch

Watch whether Venice’s plan to buy GPUs and build its own data centers materially increases gross margins and reduces reliance on leased infrastructure. Also monitor adoption trends for paid end-to-end encryption and the company’s token economics, given Venice says only about 8 percent of users currently pay with crypto. The next signal will be how that capital is deployed and whether product parity with closed-source competitors continues to narrow.