Venice raises $65M Series A at $1B valuation to build privacy-first AI empire

Venice AI, the privacy-focused generative AI platform founded by Erik Voorhees, has closed a $65 million Series A funding round at a $1 billion valuation. The round was led by Dragonfly, the crypto-native venture capital firm, with participation from Coinbase Ventures and North Island Ventures.

The numbers behind the valuation

Venice currently reports an annualized revenue run-rate exceeding $70 million, which means its $1 billion valuation sits at roughly a 14x revenue multiple. Venice claims more than 850,000 unique website visitors and over 3 million active users, with approximately 1.7 million daily API calls flowing through the platform. The platform hosts over 200 open-source AI models.

The capital will go toward scaling both Venice’s consumer-facing application and its API infrastructure. The company plans to build its own proprietary data centers and invest in new GPUs.

Only about 8% of Venice’s users currently pay with cryptocurrency, which suggests the platform’s appeal extends well beyond the crypto-native crowd.

Voorhees’ second act

Voorhees previously founded ShapeShift, the decentralized exchange that evolved from a centralized crypto trading platform to a fully decentralized protocol.

Venice launched in May 2024 with a straightforward value proposition: generative AI with client-side encryption and zero data storage. Every query, every conversation, every image generation stays on the user’s device. The platform doesn’t log prompts or responses, and it doesn’t use customer data to fine-tune its models. Voorhees has described Venice as a “neutral platform” comparable to Bitcoin itself, arguing that AI infrastructure should be resistant to censorship and centralized control.

The platform’s token ecosystem includes two assets: VVV, a utility and staking token that launched in January 2026, and DIEM, a token introduced in August 2025 that can be minted through staking VVV. DIEM functions as a daily credit system for AI usage, creating a loop where token holders earn access to the platform’s services.

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