Venice AI secured $65 million in a Series A funding round on June 25, 2026. The investment, led by Dragonfly with participation from Coinbase Ventures and North Island Ventures, established the company's valuation at $1 billion. This marks Venice AI's first external fundraise since its founding two years prior to July 2026.

Erik Voorhees, CEO of Venice AI, previously founded the cryptocurrency exchange ShapeShift and the bitcoin gambling site Satoshi Dice. ShapeShift initially did not require user identification. A Wall Street Journal investigation accused ShapeShift of processing millions of suspect funds.

Venice AI reports more than 3 million active users and over 850,000 unique website visitors. The platform processes an average of 1.7 million API calls daily. The company operates profitably with annualized run-rate revenues exceeding $70 million.

The company maintains its own data centers to host open-source models and routes queries to closed-source models from providers such as OpenAI or Anthropic. Venice AI encrypts all user input and decrypts it on the client side, routing input through an external proxy before processing. The company does not store user data on its systems and offers end-to-end encryption on some models for subscribers.

Venice AI allows users to select from AI models that generate text, images, audio, and video. The platform also offers customizable AI characters for user interaction. Venice AI modifies the system prompts of some open models to encourage more open responses and states it does not impose restrictions on the models it hosts.

"We're optimizing for freedom and actually respecting users as adults, which is, I think, rare these days," Voorhees said in an interview. He credited the company's growth to the performance of its crypto tokens and achieving feature parity with ChatGPT. "When we launched, we were very far away from what ChatGPT could do, but people would use us because it was private," Voorhees said. "And today, we're very close to what ChatGPT can do, so as we've closed that gap, it's become an increasingly compelling alternative."

Venice AI introduced a token named DIEM in August 2025, followed by the VVV token in early January 2026. Users can stake VVV tokens to mint DIEM tokens, which generate $1 worth of AI credits per day. Approximately 8% of Venice AI's users utilize cryptocurrency for payments. The company plans to use the new funding to acquire GPUs and establish its own data centers; it currently leases GPUs.