Venice AI has achieved unicorn status after raising $65 million in a Series A funding round at a $1 billion valuation. Led by Dragonfly and with backing from Coinbase Ventures, F-Prime, North Island Ventures, Morgan Creek and other investors, the round announced on Wednesday marks the company's first external capital raise since launching in 2024.
The financing signals investor appetite for privacy-focused AI platforms as the sector navigates ongoing concerns about data privacy. The funding comes in a context where Anthropic restricted foreign access to two of its latest models, and OpenAI faced a class-action suit alleging it shared ChatGPT data with third parties.
Venice AI, which says it has 3.5 million users, provides access to more than 200 AI models through a proxy between the user and the models, allowing users to choose their level of privacy. For models from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and Google, the proxy obscures users' IP address, account and session data; other models offer higher privacy protections. The capital will be used to build out Venice AI's own data center infrastructure, owning the GPUs powering its platform rather than renting them at higher costs. The remaining funds will be used to grow its customer base, enter new markets, hire talent and pursue additive acquisitions.
"This capital will be used to uphold the First and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution as they relate to mankind’s interaction with AI," Voorhees said in an X post on Wednesday.
“Control over intelligence is the defining fight of the coming decade,” said Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly.
The funding and privacy-focused positioning come amid ongoing discussions about AI privacy. In May, a proposed class action in California federal court accused OpenAI of disclosing private ChatGPT user data to Google and Meta, alleging that OpenAI embedded Meta Pixel and Google Analytics into the ChatGPT.com website, causing a user query to be associated with advertising cookies and personally identifiable information used to target advertisements.
“Whoever owns the AI delivery stack owns a direct window into your interior life. They log all your chats, train on them, and will hand them over when asked. And in the end, they decide the terms on which you'll get to access the most powerful systems humankind has ever built.”
— Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly.
