Venice AI Raises $65 Million Series A at a $1 Billion Valuation

Venice AI, building private AI for unlimited creative freedom, led by Erik Voorhees and Jesse Proudman, has raised a $65 million Series A led by Dragonfly, with backing from Coinbase Ventures, F-Prime, North Island Ventures, and others, at a $1 billion valuation, its first outside capital, to scale private, unrestricted AI globally.

Privacy-First AI.

As AI becomes central to how people think, create, and make decisions, the privacy of user interactions is becoming increasingly important. Venice is building an AI platform designed to protect user data, addressing concerns that many AI providers retain prompts, analyze user activity, and associate conversations with personal identities.

The company argues that AI should function without creating permanent records of users' thoughts and interactions. According to founder and CEO Erik Voorhees, Venice's mission is to provide AI that prioritizes privacy while reducing the risks of surveillance and censorship.

Privacy-Centric AI Platform.

Venice is designed so that user conversations are not collected or stored by the company. Prompts are not logged, and conversations remain on the user's device rather than on Venice's servers, reducing the amount of personal data retained by the platform.

The platform also aims to provide users with broad access to AI models without restricting the types of questions they can ask. Through a single interface, Venice offers access to more than 200 frontier and open-source models spanning text, image, video, and audio generation, while emphasizing user privacy and local data control.

Venice Growth Metrics.

Since launching in 2024, Venice has scaled rapidly, reaching 3.5 million registered users and processing over 1.3 trillion tokens per month. The platform handles approximately 2 million API calls per day, with peak inference traffic exceeding 300,000 requests per hour.

Web usage has also grown significantly, with 1.3 to 1.6 million monthly site visits from roughly 850,000 to 1 million unique users. In parallel, the platform’s token economy has seen 33.7 million VVV tokens burned, representing about 42% of total supply, alongside a scheduled reduction in annual emissions from 4 million to 3 million tokens to tighten supply.