Venice AI becomes a unicorn as AI privacy concerns grow
Venice AI, founded by Erik Voorhees, raised $65 million in a Series A at a $1 billion valuation, becoming a unicorn and marking its first external funding since launching in 2024. Dragonfly led the round, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, F-Prime, North Island Ventures, Morgan Creek and others. The company says the money will expand its privacy-focused AI platform, build its own data center and GPU infrastructure, grow its user base, enter new markets, hire talent, and pursue acquisitions. Venice says it has 3.5 million users and offers access to more than 200 AI models through a proxy that hides user IP, account and session data for major model providers. The raise comes amid rising concern over AI privacy, including restrictions on foreign access to some Anthropic models and legal scrutiny of OpenAI’s data-sharing practices.
