en.Wedoany.com Reported - Venice AI has completed a $65 million Series A funding round, achieving a valuation of $1 billion. The two-year-old startup attracts users by offering privacy protection and access to "uncensored" AI models.
Venice AI's platform provides access to over 200 AI models, allowing users to maintain their privacy while using these models. The company's website has attracted over 850,000 unique visitors, serves more than 3 million active users, and processes an average of 1.7 million API calls per day. CEO Erik Voorhees stated in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch that Venice AI is already profitable, with an annualized revenue exceeding $70 million.
This funding round was led by Dragonfly, a venture capital firm focused on cryptocurrency, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, North Island Ventures, and others. It marks Venice AI's first external fundraising. The company's privacy-oriented approach is clearly linked to its investors' backgrounds: Voorhees is an early Bitcoin advocate who founded the Bitcoin gambling site Satoshi Dice and the cryptocurrency exchange ShapeShift, and has long championed user privacy protection. When a Wall Street Journal investigation alleged that ShapeShift had processed millions of dollars in suspicious funds, Voorhees reportedly stated that "we shouldn't record people's identities just to catch the occasional criminal."
Venice AI hosts "uncensored" open-source models in its own data centers, while routing queries to closed-source models, such as those from OpenAI or Anthropic. All user inputs are encrypted and decrypted on the client side, processed through external proxies, and returned, with Venice's own systems storing no data. The company also offers end-to-end encryption for certain models, a feature available through a paid subscription.
The company emphasizes empowering users, allowing them to freely choose AI models capable of generating text, images, audio, and video, which vary in performance, quality, and censorship levels. The website prominently features multiple AI "characters" that users can customize and chat with. Voorhees views the service as a "neutral tool or neutral platform," stating that this principle is the same as Bitcoin's: "Bitcoin, as a neutral protocol, treats all users equally." "We optimize for freedom and truly treat users as adults," Voorhees said. Additionally, he noted that the company has modified the system prompts of some open-source models to guide them toward more open responses, but has not added any restrictions to the models themselves.
Venice AI launched a token called "VVV" in early January to attract users, and added a token called "DIEM" in August last year. Users can purchase VVV and stake it to mint DIEM, generating $1 worth of AI credits daily for use on the Venice platform. However, only about 8% of the company's users pay with cryptocurrency. The founder attributes the company's growth to the performance of its crypto tokens but believes the strongest driver is its functionality gradually approaching that of ChatGPT.
Looking ahead, Venice AI plans to use the new funds to purchase GPUs and build its own data centers, aiming to stop leasing GPUs and improve gross margins.
