Venice.ai

Venice.ai is a Wyoming-incorporated privacy-first AI platform that gives consumers and developers access to more than 200 multimodal models for text, image, video, code and audio without storing prompts or responses on its servers. Founded in 2024 by CEO Erik Voorhees (ShapeShift) and President/CTO Jesse Proudman, Venice hosts uncensored open-source models in its own data centers and routes closed-source queries through encrypted client-side paths and an external proxy so chat history stays local. The freemium product monetises via Pro subscriptions, an OpenAI-compatible API and optional staking of the VVV token for credits; by mid-2026 the company reported more than 3 million active users, about 1.7 million API calls per day and a profitable annualised revenue run rate above $70 million. In July 2026 Venice raised its first external round: a $65 million Series A at a $1 billion valuation led by Dragonfly, with Coinbase Ventures, North Island Ventures and others, to buy GPUs and build owned data centers. Sources: TechCrunch 1 Jul 2026.