Venice AI announced on July 1, 2026 that it has raised a $65 million Series A at a $1 billion valuation — its first external fundraise — making it the latest AI startup to reach unicorn status. The round was led by crypto-focused venture firm Dragonfly, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, North Island Ventures, and others.
The company, which gives users access to more than 200 AI models while keeping their data private, is already profitable. CEO Erik Voorhees told TechCrunch the company has surpassed $70 million in annualized run-rate revenue, serves more than 3 million active users, and handles an average of 1.7 million API calls per day. Its website draws more than 850,000 unique visitors.
Venice hosts open-source AI models on its own data centers and routes queries to closed-source models from providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic. User input is encrypted and decrypted on the client side and routed through an external proxy, with no data stored on Venice’s systems. End-to-end encryption is available on some models for paying subscribers.
Voorhees, an early bitcoin advocate who previously founded cryptocurrency exchange ShapeShift and bitcoin gambling site Satoshi Dice, framed Venice’s approach around user freedom. “We’re optimizing for freedom and actually respecting users as adults, which is, I think, rare these days,” he said. He described Venice as a “neutral tool or a neutral platform,” drawing a parallel to Bitcoin as a neutral protocol.
The company also has two associated crypto tokens — VVV and DIEM — though Voorhees noted only about 8% of users pay with crypto. He credited growth primarily to closing the feature gap with ChatGPT and the performance of the tokens.
Venice plans to use the new capital to purchase GPUs and build its own data centers, which Voorhees said would reduce reliance on leased infrastructure and improve gross margins.
Source: TechCrunch