2 hours ago
1
Venice AI has raised $65 million in a Series A funding round that valued the privacy focused artificial intelligence platform at $1 billion.
VVV, the native token of the Venice protocol, jumped 20% following news of the financing, as traders reacted to the company’s first external funding round since launching two years ago.
The round was led by crypto venture firm Dragonfly, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, North Island Ventures and other investors.
Venice provides access to more than 200 AI models for generating text, images, audio and video. The platform hosts open source models on its own infrastructure while routing requests for closed models from providers including OpenAI and Anthropic.
The company says prompts are encrypted and processed without being stored on its systems, positioning privacy and fewer content restrictions as alternatives to mainstream AI platforms.
CEO Erik Voorhees told TechCrunch that Venice is already profitable and has surpassed $70 million in annualized run rate revenue. The company reportedly serves more than 3 million active users and processes an average of 1.7 million API calls each day.
Voorhees said Venice treats artificial intelligence as a neutral tool and gives users greater control over which models they access and how those models respond. The approach reflects his background as an early Bitcoin advocate and founder of crypto exchange ShapeShift.
Venice is also connected to the VVV and DIEM tokens. Users can stake VVV to generate DIEM, which provides credits that can be spent on Venice’s AI services. Voorhees said crypto payments currently account for about 8% of the platform’s users.
The company plans to use the new capital to purchase GPUs and develop its own data centers. Moving away from leased computing infrastructure could reduce operating costs and improve gross margins as usage expands.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
English (US) · 