Venice AI raises $65M Series A led by Dragonfly, hitting a $1B valuation

Venice AI, the privacy-first AI platform, raised a $65 million Series A led by Dragonfly on July 1, 2026, its first outside funding, valuing the company at $1 billion. Coinbase Ventures, F-Prime and North Island Ventures also joined.

What sets the raise apart is that Venice AI says it took the money already profitable, with more than $70 million in annualized run-rate revenue. Founded by crypto veteran Erik Voorhees with Jesse Proudman, the platform reports more than 3 million registered users and says it processes 1.3 trillion tokens monthly across more than 200 AI models.

The pitch is architectural. Venice AI stores conversations locally on the user’s device rather than on its own servers, does not log prompts, and offers models with varying content-moderation levels rather than one uniform policy. It frames the design as a hedge against surveillance and censorship.

“Intelligence, the lifeblood of civilizational advancement, is becoming a collaboration between man and machine,” Voorhees said. “Venice’s mission is to protect it from mass surveillance and censorship.”

The company plans to spend the funding on buying GPUs and building its own data centers, cutting reliance on leased compute, a costly move most AI startups avoid but one that gives Venice AI more control over the pipeline it promises to keep private.

The crypto framing is thinner than the branding suggests. Despite Venice AI’s VVV and DIEM token integrations, only about 8 percent of users pay with cryptocurrency, meaning the platform runs largely as a conventional subscription business. The revenue and usage figures are the company’s own and have not been independently audited.

The $1 billion mark makes Venice AI one of the few privacy-positioned AI platforms to reach unicorn scale on a single round. Whether owned compute delivers the margins to justify it, against rivals renting cheaper capacity, is the bet investors just funded.