Venice AI raises $65M, hits unicorn status
Venice AI closes a $65M Series A led by Dragonfly at a $1B valuation with $70M ARR, 3 million users, and no user data stored on its servers.
Venice AI closed a $65M Series A led by Dragonfly on July 1, reaching a $1B valuation. The company reports $70M in annual recurring revenue and 3 million users. CEO Erik Voorhees, who previously founded the crypto exchange ShapeShift, built Venice on a model where user data is encrypted client-side and never stored on Venice’s servers. The platform runs more than 200 models. The company says it is profitable.
The pitch is a direct alternative to ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini for users who want AI capabilities without their queries stored or used for training. Client-side encryption means Venice’s own infrastructure never sees the content of a conversation. For lawyers, healthcare workers, and finance professionals with confidentiality requirements, that separation matters more than benchmark scores.
The Dragonfly investment connects Venice to a crypto-native investor base, which fits Voorhees’s history at ShapeShift. A $1B valuation on $70M ARR is roughly a 14x revenue multiple, in line with profitable high-growth SaaS at this stage.
For operators weighing data residency options, the choice now has more concrete reference points. Open WebUI 0.10’s computer agent is one fully local path; Venice sits in a different position: cloud speed with a no-logs architecture. The AI customer data privacy baseline covers the questions to ask before committing either way.