Venice AI Hits $1B Unicorn Status With $65M Series A, Already Profitable at $70M+ Revenue

Venice AI has officially joined the unicorn club, closing a $65 million Series A at a $1 billion valuation — its first external fundraise. The round was led by crypto-focused venture firm Dragonfly, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, North Island Ventures, and others. CEO Erik Voorhees, an early bitcoin advocate and founder of ShapeShift and Satoshi Dice, told TechCrunch the company is already profitable, posting annualized run-rate revenues of over $70 million. That profitability at this early stage is rare in the AI sector and signals strong product-market fit around a privacy-first positioning.

Venice AI offers access to more than 200 AI models across text, image, audio, and video — but with a fundamental difference from mainstream platforms: it stores no user data on its own servers. All user input is encrypted client-side, routed through an external proxy, and processed without being retained. End-to-end encryption is available on select models via paid subscription. The platform hosts uncensored open-source models on its own infrastructure and routes queries to closed-source providers like OpenAI and Anthropic. Venice also modifies open models' system prompts to answer more openly, without adding restrictions. Roughly 8% of users pay with crypto using the platform's VVV and DIEM token ecosystem.

In under two years since launch, Venice AI has amassed more than 850,000 unique monthly visitors and serves over 3 million active users, processing an average of 1.7 million API calls per day. Voorhees attributes growth to two factors: the performance of the platform's crypto tokens, and narrowing 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. Today, we're very close," he said. The new capital will be used to purchase GPUs and build dedicated data centers, reducing GPU leasing costs and improving gross margins.

Voorhees frames Venice AI's approach through the lens of Bitcoin-style neutrality: the platform is "a neutral tool" that treats users as adults, avoiding what he calls the more dangerous risk of mass AI surveillance. When asked about recent cases of AI-induced harm, he said his team does not add safety restrictions, drawing a parallel to how Bitcoin processes all transactions without identity checks. That positioning — freedom over filtering — is what attracts users and investors alike, including crypto-native VCs. It also means Venice AI occupies a deliberate gray area in the ongoing industry debate over AI safety and censorship.