Venice AI becomes a unicorn with $65M Series A as its privacy-first AI platform takes off

Venice AI has become a unicorn after raising a $65 million Series A at a $1 billion valuation, marking its first external funding round. The privacy-first AI platform said the round was announced on Wednesday and was led by crypto-focused venture firm Dragonfly, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, North Island Ventures and others. TechCrunch reported that within two years, Venice AI has more than 850,000 unique website visitors and supports more than 3 million active users, averaging 1.7 million API calls per day. It provides access to more than 200 AI models by routing queries to closed-source models such as OpenAI or Anthropic, while hosting open-source “uncensored” models in its own data centers. User inputs are encrypted and unencrypted client-side, routed via an external proxy, and not stored in Venice systems. CEO Erik Voorhees said the company is already profitable, with annualized run-rate revenues over $70 million.