The Venice AI Series A marks an unusual milestone: a privacy-first AI platform, two years old and already profitable, closing its first outside equity raise at a $1 billion valuation. The $65 million round was led by crypto-focused venture firm Dragonfly, with Coinbase Ventures, North Island Ventures, and others participating.
Venice offers access to more than 200 AI models, hosting open-source versions on its own data centres and routing queries to closed-source models from providers including OpenAI and Anthropic. User inputs are encrypted and decrypted on the client side, routed through an external proxy, and, according to Venice AI’s official blog, conversations are stored locally on the user’s own device rather than on the company’s servers.
The platform has accumulated more than 850,000 unique visitors to its website, serves more than 3 million active users, and handles an average of 1.7 million API calls per day. Annualised run-rate revenues have crossed $70 million, and the company turned profitable in the first quarter of 2026, ahead of the Series A closing, according to Bitcoin.com.
The Venice AI Series A: What Investors Actually Bought
The deal structure goes beyond a straightforward equity cheque. Series A investors received an 8.98% stake in the company, a vesting grant of 1.5 million VVV tokens, and warrants to purchase up to 5 million additional VVV over eight years, per Bitcoin.com’s reporting on the round.
VVV is Venice’s native token, launched in early January on Ethereum’s layer-2 Base network with a total supply of 100 million tokens. At launch, 25 million were airdropped to more than 100,000 registered Venice users, and another 25 million were allocated to AI protocol accounts on the Base blockchain, including agents Luna, aixbt, and VaderAI, as Venice AI’s own blog set out. A separate Yahoo Finance report on the VVV token launch confirmed the Base network deployment and the airdrop figures.
The tokenomics have moved materially since launch. Venice has burned roughly 42% of VVV’s circulating supply and holds 30 million of the 80 million total tokens in its treasury, according to Bitcoin.com. A second token, DIEM, was added in August last year: users stake VVV to mint DIEM, which generates $1 worth of AI credits per day to spend on the platform. Only around 8% of users pay with crypto, however. Venice’s CEO Erik Voorhees credited growth primarily to closing the feature gap with ChatGPT, with the token performance as a secondary driver.
From ShapeShift to a $1 Billion Platform
Voorhees is a well-known figure in crypto circles. He founded the bitcoin gambling site Satoshi Dice and the cryptocurrency exchange ShapeShift, and has long advocated for privacy as a first principle. The overlap between his background and Venice’s investor roster is plain: Dragonfly, Coinbase Ventures, and North Island Ventures are all crypto-native.
His record with regulators is mixed. ShapeShift settled Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charges in March 2024, agreeing to pay a $275,000 civil penalty for acting as an unregistered securities dealer; three of five SEC commissioners found that ShapeShift held crypto asset securities and traded against its own users from 2014 until early 2021, as Protos reported on the settlement. Before that, Voorhees had previously settled with the SEC over an illegal stock offering connected to an internet gambling company.
When asked about Venice’s approach to content moderation, given recent cases of AI psychosis and resulting harm, Voorhees framed the platform in familiar terms. ‘This is the same principle that you have in Bitcoin, where Bitcoin, as a neutral protocol, works the same way for all people,’ he said. ‘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.’
The platform openly markets an ‘uncensored’ experience. Venice works on some open models’ system prompts to instruct them to respond more openly, though it does not add restrictions. ‘We’re optimising for freedom and actually respecting users as adults, which is, I think, rare these days,’ Voorhees said.
The fresh capital is earmarked for buying GPUs and building proprietary data centres, replacing leased infrastructure to lift gross margins. With profitability already established and the feature gap with ChatGPT narrowing, the test ahead is whether Venice can hold its user base as mainstream AI providers sharpen their own privacy offerings.
