Venice AI Hits Unicorn Status with $65M Series A — Privacy-First AI Platform Reaches $1B Valuation

Venice AI, the privacy-first platform offering uncensored access to 200+ AI models, has raised a $65M Series A led by Dragonfly at a $1B valuation. Already profitable with $70M ARR and 3M+ active users, the startup is now buying its own GPUs and building data centers.

Key Takeaways

Venice AI, the privacy-first platform offering uncensored access to 200+ AI models, has raised a $65M Series A led by Dragonfly at a $1B valuation.
Already profitable with $70M ARR and 3M+ active users, the startup is now buying its own GPUs and building data centers.

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Venice AI, a startup that lets users access more than 200 AI models — including uncensored open-source ones — while keeping their data private, has officially become a unicorn. The company announced Wednesday it raised a $65 million Series A at a $1 billion valuation, its first external fundraising round.

The round was led by Dragonfly, a crypto-focused venture firm, with participation from Coinbase Ventures and North Island Ventures. The crypto-native investor lineup reflects the background of CEO Erik Voorhees, a longtime Bitcoin advocate who previously founded crypto exchange ShapeShift and bitcoin gambling site Satoshi Dice.

Venice AI is already profitable, with annualized run-rate revenues exceeding $70 million. It serves over 3 million active users and handles an average of 1.7 million API calls per day. The company hosts uncensored open-source models on its own data centers and routes queries to closed-source models from OpenAI and Anthropic through encrypted proxies. All user input is encrypted client-side with no data stored on Venice's own systems.

"We're optimizing for freedom and actually respecting users as adults, which is, I think, rare these days," Voorhees told TechCrunch.

The company plans to use the fresh capital to buy GPUs and build its own data centers, moving away from leasing compute to improve gross margins. Venice also operates two crypto tokens — VVV and DIEM — though only about 8% of users pay with crypto.

Venice's growth has been driven by closing the feature gap with ChatGPT while maintaining its privacy-first stance. The platform prominently offers uncensored AI "characters" that users can customize and chat with, positioning itself as the anti-surveillance alternative in an increasingly monitored AI landscape.