Venice AI has raised a $65 million Series A at a $1 billion valuation, giving the privacy-focused AI platform unicorn status two years after launch.
The round was led by Dragonfly, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, North Island Ventures and other investors. It was Venice’s first external fundraise, adding institutional capital to a business that founder Erik Voorhees says is already profitable.
Venice has built its pitch around private AI access rather than locked-down corporate assistants. The platform gives users access to more than 200 AI models and supports text, images, video, audio, code, search and agent workflows. Its public site describes the product as private or anonymized AI access, with zero data retention for self-hosted open-source models and stronger privacy tiers for paid users.
The company has reached more than 3 million active users, more than 850,000 unique site visitors and an average of 1.7 million API calls per day. Voorhees also put Venice’s annual revenue run rate above $70 million, making the valuation tied to both privacy demand and revenue traction.
Venice plans to use the new capital to buy GPUs and build its own data centers. That would reduce reliance on leased compute and could improve gross margins if demand for private AI inference keeps growing.
The infrastructure push fits the company’s broader product position. Venice hosts uncensored open-source models in its own data centers and routes some closed-model requests through external systems, while stripping identifying metadata and avoiding storage of user prompts on Venice systems. Some models also support end-to-end encryption through paid subscriptions.
Voorhees has framed the company around private and unrestricted machine intelligence, a continuation of the same privacy and neutrality themes that shaped his earlier crypto work at ShapeShift. The new investor list keeps Venice close to crypto-native capital, with Dragonfly and Coinbase Ventures backing a platform that already uses tokenized access and AI compute credits.
Venice launched the VVV token in early 2025 to support AI API access. Users can buy and stake VVV to mint DIEM, which generates AI credits that can be spent on Venice. Voorhees said only about 8% of users pay with crypto, keeping VVV important to the ecosystem without making the entire business dependent on token payments.
The Venice round lands as AI and crypto infrastructure are moving closer together. Coinbase has already launched AI agents that can connect to user accounts, trade and prepare for stablecoin-powered payments inside permissioned limits.
Agent marketplaces are also becoming more competitive. OKX recently launched an AI marketplace where agents can discover work, hire other agents, complete tasks and settle payments onchain. Cloudflare’s new Monetization Gateway added another layer by letting customers charge for protected web assets through stablecoin payments over x402.
Venice sits in a different part of that stack. It is not mainly a payment network or exchange agent platform. It is trying to become a private AI access layer for users, developers and agents that need model choice, API access and lower data-retention risk.
The $65 million round gives Venice more capital to control compute while demand for private AI tools grows. VVV traded near $13.68 at the latest market check, with an intraday low of $12.08 and a high of $14.83.
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