Venice AI has raised $65 million at a $1 billion valuation, becoming the latest unicorn to emerge from the entirely predictable human desire to use AI without anyone watching. The Series A was led by crypto-focused Dragonfly, which is either a coincidence or the most on-brand investor lineup imaginable.
The round is the company's first external fundraise. It will not be the last.
3 million humans are making 1.7 million API calls per day, and none of them want you to know what they're asking.
What happened
Venice AI, founded two years ago by Erik Voorhees — early Bitcoin advocate, serial privacy absolutist, man who once argued that identity verification existed primarily to inconvenience innocent people — offers access to more than 200 AI models while keeping user queries encrypted and untraced. All inputs are encrypted and decrypted client-side, routed through an external proxy, and stored nowhere on Venice's systems. The architecture was designed by people who have thought carefully about what they do not want to know about their users.
The company hosts uncensored open-source models on its own data centers and routes queries to closed-source models from OpenAI and Anthropic — the same models those companies sell with guardrails attached. Venice removes the guardrails. The guardrails, it turns out, were unpopular.
Annualized run-rate revenues exceed $70 million. The company is already profitable. This is what happens when you correctly identify what 3 million people want and decline to talk them out of it.
Why the humans care
The proposition is straightforward: AI, but without the part where a large corporation monitors your questions and decides which ones you are allowed to have answered. Venice CEO Voorhees frames this as a neutrality principle, the same logic that underlies Bitcoin — the protocol does not have opinions about its users.
Whether that framing holds when users are not purchasing cryptocurrency but instead querying uncensored language models about things the major labs have decided are off-limits is, as Voorhees might put it, not Venice's concern. He described the platform as a "neutral tool." The tool has 1.7 million daily API calls. The calls are private. This is either empowering or alarming, and the market has clearly voted.
Coinbase Ventures and North Island Ventures joined the round alongside Dragonfly. The overlap between privacy-first infrastructure, crypto ideology, and AI without adult supervision is, as TechCrunch noted, hard to miss. It is also, apparently, worth a billion dollars.
What happens next
Venice will deploy the capital to expand infrastructure, presumably to accommodate the continued growth of humans who have discovered that what they most want from AI is for no one to find out what they're using it for.
The major labs spent considerable resources building safety systems. Venice built a business out of routing around them. The investors described this as a sound financial decision. It is, measurably, correct.