Venice AI Becomes a Unicorn With a $65 Million Series A for Private, Uncensored AI

Two years after it launched with a pitch that ran directly against the AI industry's prevailing instincts — collect the data, filter the outputs, keep the receipts — Venice AI has been rewarded for the contrarian bet. The privacy-focused startup said Wednesday it raised a $65 million Series A at a $1 billion valuation, minting a new unicorn and handing crypto veteran Erik Voorhees a mandate to build a mass-market alternative to ChatGPT that stores nothing and censors little.

The round, Venice's first external capital, was led by crypto-focused firm Dragonfly, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, North Island Ventures, F-Prime Capital, Archetype, Morgan Creek, Liquid2 Ventures and Seattle-based Founders' Co-op. What sets the deal apart from the flood of AI mega-rounds is that Venice did not need the money. The company is already profitable, with annualized run-rate revenues of more than $70 million, and it turned its first profit in the first quarter of 2026.

"In April, we hit 3 million users, and as of Q1, in an environment where AI firms were losing money while spying on you, Venice became profitable while choosing not to," the company said in announcing the raise.

A neutral tool, by design

Venice routes queries to more than 200 AI models spanning text, images, audio and video — hosting "uncensored" open-source models in its own infrastructure while passing prompts to closed models from OpenAI and Anthropic anonymously through its API. The architecture is the product. User input is encrypted client-side and routed through an external proxy, with conversations stored on the user's device rather than Venice's servers. With no central trove of prompts, the company argues, there is nothing to breach, subpoena or sell.

That thesis flows straight from Voorhees's history. An early bitcoin advocate, he founded the crypto exchange ShapeShift and the bitcoin gambling site Satoshi Dice, and has spent more than a decade arguing against surveillance and heavy-handed regulation. He frames Venice in the same terms.

"This is the same principle that you have in Bitcoin, where Bitcoin, as a neutral protocol, works the same way for all people," Voorhees told TechCrunch. "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."

Co-founder, President and CTO Jesse Proudman, a Seattle serial entrepreneur who sold cloud company Blue Box to IBM in 2015, casts privacy as the natural consequence of how people now use chatbots — for medical questions, legal issues, job negotiations and relationship advice.

"It only takes one breach, one disgruntled employee who is going through that data, a government subpoena, a change in government policy — and then all of that data no longer is private to you," Proudman said. His ambition is squarely consumer: "We want people to open their phones and have our app sitting alongside" ChatGPT and Claude.

The numbers behind the raise

Venice says it now has 3.5 million registered users, processes 1.3 trillion tokens a month, and fields roughly 2 million API calls a day. The company credits the growth partly to its dual crypto tokens — the VVV token, up more than 700% this year, and DIEM, which lets users mint $1-per-day AI credits — but Voorhees says the bigger driver was catching up to the incumbents. "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," he said.

The deal terms reflect Venice's crypto DNA. In exchange for $65 million, investors received an 8.98% equity stake, a vesting grant of 1.5 million VVV tokens, and warrants to buy 5 million more over eight years — a structure that could push total capital raised toward $131.5 million if fully exercised. Notably, Venice chose to sell equity rather than dip into its treasury of more than 30 million VVV tokens. "We don't want to sell the token," Voorhees said, adding that the company waited to launch its product and token before taking VC money: "We wanted to do the opposite of most other projects. Most pre-sell to VCs on undisclosed terms and promise to build a product or find users later."

The fresh cash is earmarked for a build-out that turns Venice from a reseller of leased GPUs into an owner of its own compute. The company plans to construct its first data center, which Voorhees says "ensures capacity in the coming resource squeeze and increases gross margins." Venice has grown to about 45 employees, up from roughly 15 a year ago, and operates fully remote.

Why It Matters

Venice is the clearest commercial proof yet that "privacy-first, uncensored AI" is a real market, not a fringe ideology — and that it can be profitable while the frontier labs bleed cash. That is a pointed rebuke to the industry consensus that scale, data retention and heavy guardrails are the price of building useful AI.

But the model lives in genuine tension with safety. The same design that shields a user asking about a cancer diagnosis also removes the friction that mainstream services build in to prevent misuse — and it does so at a moment when regulators, courts and grieving families are scrutinizing cases of "AI psychosis" and chatbot-fueled harm. Venice's answer is to reframe the debate: it bills itself as an "AI safety company," casting mass surveillance of users' thoughts, not the content of any single prompt, as the graver danger. Voorhees is blunt about the trade-off he's making. "We're optimizing for freedom and actually respecting users as adults, which is, I think, rare these days," he said. Proudman concedes the company builds in some safeguards against illegal activity, an acknowledgment that "uncensored" has limits even here.

What to Watch

The near-term test is execution on infrastructure: owning GPUs is capital-intensive, and Venice is betting a modest $65 million against a compute crunch that its far-larger rivals are spending tens of billions to weather. Watch, too, for regulatory friction — a service that deliberately retains no logs and strips content filters is a natural target as governments draft AI-safety and liability rules. There is a political wrinkle closer to home: Proudman has said he will leave Washington over the state's new 9.9% "millionaires tax," pinning his hopes on a November repeal effort, which could reshape Venice's Seattle footprint. And the crypto scaffolding remains a wild card — only about 8% of users currently pay in crypto, so whether the token economy underpins or merely accompanies the business is a question the next year will answer.