Most AI companies are racing to add guardrails. Venice AI built a business by doing the opposite. The startup gives users access to more than 200 AI models, stores none of their data, and lets them interact with those models without restrictions. That pitch has clearly landed: the company now has over 850,000 unique monthly website visitors, more than 3 million active users, and handles an average of 1.7 million API calls per day.
Now the money is catching up with the growth. Venice AI has announced a $65 million Series A at a $1 billion valuation, making it a unicorn just two years after launching. The round was led by Dragonfly, a crypto-focused venture firm, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, North Island Ventures, and others. It’s the company’s first external fundraise.
What makes this particularly notable is that Venice is already profitable. CEO Erik Voorhees told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview that the company has annualized run-rate revenues of over $70 million. That’s a rare position for an AI startup at this stage, and it tells you something about how much unmet demand there is for AI tools that don’t track what you’re doing.
The company’s technical setup is worth understanding. Venice hosts open source, uncensored models on its own data centers, and also routes queries to closed-source models from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. All user input is encrypted and decrypted on the client side, then sent through an external proxy before being processed. Venice says nothing is stored on its own systems. End-to-end encryption is available on some models, though that requires a paid subscription.
Voorhees has a long history in crypto, and his views on privacy are consistent across his career. He founded bitcoin gambling site Satoshi Dice and cryptocurrency exchange ShapeShift, and has been an outspoken advocate for privacy since the early days of bitcoin. ShapeShift originally didn’t require users to identify themselves, which led to a Wall Street Journal investigation accusing the platform of processing millions in suspect funds. Voorhees reportedly responded at the time: “I don’t think people should have their identity recorded to catch an occasional criminal.” His position on Venice is essentially the same.
When asked about recent cases where AI interactions have contributed to real-world harm, Voorhees described Venice as a “neutral tool or a neutral platform.” He drew a direct comparison to Bitcoin’s protocol-level neutrality, and argued that the bigger risk to society is mass surveillance, not individual users asking controversial questions.
“We’re optimizing for freedom and actually respecting users as adults, which is, I think, rare these days,” he said.
That philosophy shapes the product. Users can choose from models that generate text, images, audio, and video, with options that vary in quality, performance, and how much content filtering they apply. The platform also lets users chat with customizable AI characters. Venice says it sometimes adjusts system prompts on open models to encourage more open responses, but doesn’t add any restrictions.
There’s a crypto layer too, though it’s not central to the business. Venice launched a token called VVV in January as a user acquisition tool, and added a second token called DIEM in August last year. Users can stake VVV to mint DIEM, which generates $1 worth of daily AI credits to spend on the platform. Despite the crypto-heavy investor base, Voorhees said only about 8% of users actually pay with crypto.
On what drove the company’s growth, Voorhees pointed to two things. First, the performance of the crypto tokens helped attract early users. But the bigger driver, he said, was closing the gap with ChatGPT on features. “When we launched, we were very far away from what ChatGPT could do, but people would use us because it was private. And today, we’re very close to what ChatGPT can do, so as we’ve closed that gap, it’s become an increasingly compelling alternative.”
The $65 million will go toward buying GPUs and building out Venice’s own data centers. Right now the company leases GPU capacity, which limits its gross margins. Owning the hardware should help fix that as the platform continues to grow.
Venice’s rise fits into a broader pattern. As major AI labs face pressure from governments and advocacy groups to tighten their models’ behavior, a growing segment of users is pushing back. They want AI tools that work without conditions attached. Venice has positioned itself squarely in that space, and the numbers suggest there’s a real market there, regardless of where you stand on whether those guardrails are a good idea in the first place.