Private AI Platform Venice Becomes a Unicorn After $65 Million Round

Venice, a two-year-old AI platform built around privacy and freedom from content restrictions, has announced its first outside funding round. The $65 million Series A values the company at $1 billion, making it a new unicorn in the market for privacy-focused AI tools.

A no-logging model

Venice was founded in 2024 by Erik Voorhees, known in the crypto industry as the creator of the ShapeShift exchange and the bitcoin-based gambling site Satoshi Dice. The company promises users something none of the big AI players offer: no server-side storage of conversation content. Chats are kept locally on the user's device, and queries are encrypted on the client side before being routed through an external proxy server to the underlying model.

Venice hosts some models, including uncensored open-source ones, on its own infrastructure. Queries directed to closed models, such as those from OpenAI or Anthropic, pass through Venice's proxy system, which is designed to prevent those model providers from linking a query to a specific user.

Who the customers are

The platform has built a base of more than 3 million active users and processes 1.7 million API calls a day, with over 850,000 unique monthly visitors. Venice says it is already profitable, with annualized revenue above $70 million.

Billing on Venice partly relies on two crypto tokens, VVV and DIEM, which can be used to buy credits for using the models. Despite the company's crypto roots and crypto-focused investors, only about 8 percent of users pay this way, with the rest using traditional payment methods.

We're optimizing for freedom and for genuinely treating users like adults - Erik Voorhees, CEO of Venice

Where the money will go

Until now, Venice has run its infrastructure on rented GPUs. The fresh capital is meant to let the company start buying its own GPUs and building its own data centers, which should lower operating costs and improve margins currently squeezed by third-party compute rental prices.

Privacy as a competitive edge

Venice's round fits into a broader trend of growing concern over the privacy of data shared with large language models. As companies and individual users increasingly encounter reports of leaks, logged conversations, or data being used to train further models, a no-tracking, locally-stored offering is becoming a genuine sales argument rather than just a marketing slogan.

For the Polish market, where companies are increasingly asking whether AI tools comply with RODO (Poland's implementation of the EU's GDPR data protection rules) and internal data security policies, the emergence of a well-funded player building its entire value proposition around privacy could pressure other providers to be clearer about what happens to the data entered into their models.

Venice remains a niche player compared to giants like OpenAI or Google, and its open approach to uncensored models also raises questions about responsible use of such tools. The company's progress will now be watched both for its revenue growth rate and for whether it can maintain its stated no-logging policy at a scale of several million users.

Sources: TechCrunch (techcrunch.com), Venice blog (venice.ai)