Venice AI Raises $65 Million Series A at $1 Billion Valuation
Venice AI, a platform that provides uncensored access to artificial intelligence models, raised a $65 million Series A at a $1 billion equity valuation, led by Dragonfly and Craig Harper of Hosseeb. The financing marks founder Erik Voorhees’s venture as the latest to join the unicorn club after achieving profitability in the first quarter of 2026.
The company plans to deploy the capital to scale the platform for hundreds of millions of users and several billion AI agents, according to the announcement. The funding will finance a data center build-out, marking Venice’s first move into owning its own compute infrastructure to secure capacity amid tightening AI hardware markets. Dragonfly and Hosseeb also received a 1.5 million VVV token vesting grant and warrants to purchase up to 5 million VVV, which can be exercised for an additional $66.5 million over the next eight years.
From the sources (23 posts)
@aggrnewsVENICE AI SECURES $65 M SERIES A, REACHING UNICORN STATUS WITH A $1 B+ VALUATION: TECHCRUNCH
@fintechfrankVenice AI becomes a unicorn with $65M Series A as its privacy-first AI platform takes off
@degeneratenewsNEW: VENICE AI BECOMES A UNICORN WITH $65M SERIES A AS ITS PRIVACY-FIRST AI PLATFORM TAKES OFF SOURCE: TECHCRUNCH -
@hosseebControl over intelligence is the defining fight of the coming decade. 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 en
@hosseebRT @jesseproudman: Today, @askvenice announced a $65M Series A at a $1B valuation. We started this company in 2024 with a simple convictio…
@erikvoorheesThis capital will be used to uphold the First and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution as they relate to mankind’s interaction with AI. To those hearing about us for the first time, consider switching to an AI platform that doesn’t demand
@theblockcoTHE BLOCK: Venice AI has raised a $65 million Series A at a $1 billion valuation, giving the privacy-focused AI platform unicorn status. Founder Erik Voorhees said they will "construct the platform dedicated to private and unrestricted mac
@brian_armstrongImportant infrastructure for freedom - great foresight by @ErikVoorhees building Venice
@erikvoorheesRT @brian_armstrong: Important infrastructure for freedom - great foresight by @ErikVoorhees building Venice
@trustlessstateRT @ErikVoorhees:
@trustlessstate"This capital will be used to uphold the First and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution as they relate to mankind’s interaction with AI." ✍️🔥 Congrats @AskVenice!
@erikvoorheesVVV and Capital Measured by revenue, Venice has become the largest company at the intersection of AI and cryptoeconomics. Today, we announced Venice’s first round of outside capital, a $65m Series A led by @dragonfly_xyz, valuing Venice’s
@erikvoorheestl;dr • More capital for Venice • Greater scale • More customers • More burning • Aligned long-term incentives for VC + Company + Community
@erikvoorheesAs of Q1, Venice achieved profitability. So why raise at all? For scale. We are making Venice a mass market consumer app, an open and unrestricted AI platform for at least a few hundred million people and several billion AI agents. Do
@erikvoorheesSome of the capital will be used to vertically integrate compute; we’ve begun a datacenter build out and will be the first time Venice has owned its own compute. This ensures capacity in the coming resource squeeze and increases gross marg
@erikvoorheesTo raise such capital, we could have either sold some of Venice’s treasury VVV directly to the market, or sold equity. We chose the latter. Despite 700%+ YTD growth, we don't want to sell the token. Venice remains the largest holder of
@erikvoorheesThe Series A investors received the following in return for the $65m in new capital: • 8.98% of the company • Vesting grant of 1.5m VVV • The right to buy 5m VVV in the next eight years. To exercise the right (token warrant, aka call optio
@erikvoorheesBoth the grant and warrant VVV (if exercised) are locked for a year and then unlock linearly over 3 additional years. This means that by the time the first VVV unlocks for any institutional investor, it will be over two years since Venice’
@erikvoorheesWe wanted to do the opposite of most other projects: while most pre-sell to VCs on undisclosed terms and promise to build a product or find users later, Venice didn’t pre-sell to anyone and had already demonstrated product-market fit for a
@erikvoorheesIn terms of supply dynamics, assuming investors pay the additional $66.5m to exercise their warrants, the supply release to the market will be just under 6k VVV per day starting roughly a year from now, or about 0.2% of today’s daily trade
@erikvoorheesAs for how any of this changes Venice’s token plans, it doesn’t. We build a product, grow revenue, take a portion of revenue to buy and burn tokens, and reduce emissions. Our incentive to do this is that we hold more VVV than anyone.
@erikvoorheesOur hope is that this demonstrates a better-aligned model between company, venture capital, and community. With this, we scale private and unrestricted intelligence, building Venice into the port city for agentic civilization. On the hori
@bitcoinnewsErik Voorhees announces Venice AI has raised $65M in Series A funding at a $1B valuation. 💥 The platform, which offers private and uncensored AI alternatives, reached 3M users in April. Watch the interview with Voorhees.👇