Venice raised a $65 million Series A led by Dragonfly, with backing from Coinbase Ventures, F-Prime, North Island Ventures, and others. The investment round values Venice at $1 billion, roughly two years after public launch, and is the first outside capital the company has raised.
According to latest data provided by Venice, the two year old startup now serves 3.5 million registered users and processes 1.3 trillion tokens per month.
The privacy problem Venice solves: More of how people reason, create, and decide now runs through AI. That makes the AI layer the most sensitive surface in a person’s digital life, and most providers treat it as data to keep.
Major AI providers store user data permanently. Every prompt is logged, analyzed, and tied to the user’s identity. That record can be sold, hacked, subpoenaed, or handed to a government.
As AI becomes the primary gateway to the digital world, that is not a footnote on privacy. It is surveillance aimed at the most personal thing a person has: their thoughts.
“Intelligence, the lifeblood of civilizational advancement, is becoming a collaboration between man and machine,” said Erik Voorhees, founder and CEO of Venice. “Venice’s mission is to protect it from mass surveillance and censorship.”
Erik Voorhees founded Venice in 2024 to enable billions of people to use machine intelligence without sacrificing their privacy. Since launch, the platform has grown fast:
- 3.5M registered users
- 1.3T tokens processed per month
- 2M API calls per day from developers, peaking above 2.1M
- 300K inference requests per hour at peak
- 1.3M to 1.6M site visits per month from roughly 850K to 1M unique visitors
The token economy tracks the same growth. 33.7 million VVV has been burned, about 42 percent of the total supply, and emissions step down from 4 million to 3 million per year on July 1, tightening supply as demand rises.