Venice AI Completes $65 Million Funding Round at $1 Billion Valuation

Venice AI founder Erik Voorhees announced on Wednesday that the company has completed its first external funding round, raising $65 million at a $1 billion valuation. The round was led by Dragonfly, with participation from North Island Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Archetype, Liquid2 Ventures, and Morgan Creek. Launched in May 2024, Venice AI is a privacy-focused AI chatbot alternative platform designed to prevent storing user conversations on centralized company servers. Voorhees stated that Venice AI has surpassed 3 million users and has already achieved profitability in the first quarter. Voorhees said the new capital will be used to expand the Venice platform, which provides access to major open-source and proprietary AI models through a single interface and API. The annual issuance of Venice AI's native token, VVV, was reduced to 3 million tokens on Wednesday, used to reward token holders who support the network by staking VVV.