level: business
venice ai, a startup offering private and uncensored access to more than 200 ai models, has raised a $65 million series a round at a $1 billion valuation. the company, founded by bitcoin advocate erik voorhees, encrypts user inputs and routes them through external proxies, storing no data on its own systems. it already has over 850,000 unique website visitors, 3 million active users, and processes 1.7 million api calls daily, with annualized revenues exceeding $70 million.
the platform lets users choose from text, image, audio, and video models, including open-source and closed-source options from openai and anthropic. voorhees describes venice as a neutral tool, resisting content restrictions beyond what models inherently have. the company also offers end-to-end encryption for paying subscribers and has two associated crypto tokens, vvv and diem, though only 8% of users pay with crypto.
the funding, led by dragonfly with coinbase ventures and others, will help venice buy gpus and build its own data centers to reduce reliance on leased hardware and improve margins. voorhees credits growth to closing the feature gap with chatgpt while maintaining privacy. the startup plans to continue expanding its model offerings and user base, betting that demand for unrestricted, private ai will keep rising.
why it matters: it shows a growing market for privacy-preserving ai tools that give users control over model choice and data, relevant for data scientists exploring deployment options.