Venice AI Raises $65M in Series A Funding Led by Dragonfly

The round also saw participation from Coinbase Ventures and North Island Ventures.

The company will use the funding to expand its product engineering team, invest in high-performance GPU computing resources, and speed up the launch of its enterprise zero-knowledge data security solutions.

Venice is an AI platform designed as a private and less restricted alternative to chatbots like ChatGPT. It was founded in 2024 by cryptocurrency entrepreneur Erik Voorhees, founder of ShapeShift, and Jesse Proudman, who previously sold cloud company Blue Box Group to IBM.

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The platform gives users access to more than 200 open-source and proprietary AI models for text, image, video, and audio through a single interface and API. Unlike many AI providers, Venice says it does not store user prompts on its servers. Instead, conversations are kept on the user's device, and the platform offers fewer content restrictions than many competing AI services.

Venice says its privacy-focused approach is gaining traction. The platform has more than 3.5 million registered users, processes 1.3 trillion AI tokens each month, and has become profitable in the first quarter, while many other AI companies are still operating at a loss.

Co-founder, President and Chief Technology Officer Proudman said Venice wants to sit on users’ phones alongside ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude.

Proudman tied the privacy case to 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 is no longer private to you,” he said. The company concedes that its lighter guardrails invite misuse questions and says it builds in some safeguards against illegal activity.

The design is deliberate, according to the company. With no central store of prompts and responses, there is nothing to breach, subpoena or sell. “Venice’s mission is to protect [intelligence] from mass surveillance and censorship,” said Chief Executive Voorhees, who argues that the surveillance of users’ thoughts, rather than model capability or job displacement, is becoming the industry’s defining risk.

About Venice AI

Founded in 2024 by Erik Voorhees, Venice AI develops AI platforms for consumers and businesses that focus on privacy. The platform allows users to interact with AI without storing prompt histories, collecting personal data or tracking user activity.

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