The Venice AI Series A has landed at $65 million, valuing the two-year-old startup at $1 billion and marking its first external fundraise. The round was led by crypto-focused venture firm Dragonfly, with Coinbase Ventures, North Island Ventures, and others joining in. The unicorn tag arrived fast, and, to Venice’s credit, the underlying numbers give it more substance than most.
The company already has more than 850,000 unique visitors to its website, serves more than 3 million active users, and fields an average of 1.7 million API calls per day. Annualised run-rate revenues have topped $70 million, according to CEO Erik Voorhees. Crucially, Venice turned profitable in Q1 2026, before a single penny of Series A cash arrived.
What the Venice AI Series A Actually Buys
Voorhees has been direct about the plan: stop leasing GPUs, start buying them, and build out Venice’s own data centres to lift gross margins. Right now, the platform hosts ‘uncensored’ open-source models on third-party infrastructure and routes queries to closed-source models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and others. Owning the hardware changes the unit economics considerably.
The deal structure is worth unpacking. According to the Venice AI blog, Series A investors received 8.98% of the company, a vesting grant of 1.5 million VVV tokens, and warrants to purchase up to 5 million additional VVV tokens over eight years. That crypto kicker is not incidental: the lead investor, Dragonfly, is a crypto-focused fund, and the token mechanics sit at the heart of how Venice thinks about its own ecosystem.
VVV is a token on Ethereum’s Base blockchain. Since November 2025, Venice has used a portion of monthly revenue to buy and burn VVV on an ongoing basis. The platform has now burned roughly 42% of VVV’s circulating supply and holds 30 million of the 80 million total VVV tokens in its own treasury, according to Bitcoin.com News. Staking 100 VVV, meanwhile, provides free access to Venice Pro, per the Venice VVV token page. For all that crypto infrastructure, only about 8% of users currently pay with crypto. The other 92% are just here for the private AI.
Privacy by Design, Not by Policy
The privacy pitch is not merely a marketing line. User conversations are stored on the user’s own device, not on Venice’s servers. All input is encrypted and decrypted client-side, routed through an external proxy before processing, with no data retained on Venice’s own systems. End-to-end encryption is available on select models for paying subscribers.
Venice offers access to more than 200 AI models spanning text, images, audio, and video. The range of censorship applied varies by model, and the company works on some open models’ system prompts to encourage more open responses, though it adds no restrictions of its own.
Voorhees frames this as a principled stance rather than a feature list. ‘We’re optimising for freedom and actually respecting users as adults, which is, I think, rare these days,’ he said. He also pushed back on the idea that a platform bears responsibility for how individuals use it: ‘This is the same principle that you have in Bitcoin, where Bitcoin, as a neutral protocol, works the same way for all people.’
The ideological throughline is consistent with Voorhees’s background. He is an early bitcoin advocate who founded Satoshi Dice and cryptocurrency exchange ShapeShift. The latter attracted scrutiny in September 2018, when the Wall Street Journal reported ShapeShift had processed nearly $9 million in suspect funds, more than any other exchange with US offices, in a piece titled ‘How Dirty Money Disappears Into the Black Hole of Cryptocurrency.’ Voorhees’s response then was consistent with his position now: ‘I don’t think people should have their identity recorded to catch an occasional criminal.’
On the question of AI psychosis and resulting harm, he told TechCrunch his team treats Venice as a ‘neutral tool or a neutral platform,’ adding: ‘I think it’s actually quite dangerous from a safety perspective, for the world to enter this next phase and have everyone be constantly watched. To me that is actually much more dangerous than any particular person asking a controversial question or something that might be considered bad.’
Growth, Voorhees said, came from two places: the strong performance of the crypto tokens, and closing the feature gap with ChatGPT. ‘When we launched, we were very far away from what ChatGPT could do, but people would use us because it was private. And today, we’re very close to what ChatGPT can do […] so as we’ve closed that gap, it’s become an increasingly compelling alternative,’ he said.
The real test arrives once Venice starts deploying the Series A capital on GPU procurement. Margin expansion on owned hardware is the number that will determine whether a $1 billion valuation looks prescient or generous in two years’ time.
