Venice AI Valued at $1 Billion as Erik Voorhees Makes the Case for Private ChatGPT Rivals

Venice AI has raised $65 million in its first outside funding round at a $1 billion valuation, founder Erik Voorhees announced Wednesday.

In a post on X, Voorhees—a cryptocurrency industry veteran who is best known as the founder of the ShapeShift exchange—said the funding validates Venice’s mission to build a private, uncensored alternative to mainstream AI like ChatGPT.

“This aversion to ubiquitous centralized surveillance and control is our philosophical foundation, and upon it Venice is growing rapidly,” Voorhees wrote. “In April, we hit 3 million users, and as of Q1, in an environment where AI firms were losing money while spying on you, Venice became profitable while choosing not to.”

Launched in May 2024, Venice AI is a privacy-focused alternative to mainstream AI chatbots that is designed to avoid storing users’ conversations on centralized company servers. The round was led by Dragonfly, with participation from North Island Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Archetype, Liquid2 Ventures, and Morgan Creek.

Venice AI native token (VVV) rose following the funding announcement and is currently trading at $13.74, up 11% over the last 24 hours, according to CoinGecko. VVV emissions were also trimmed Wednesday to 3 million per year, which are awarded to token holders who stake their VVV to support the network. That means fewer tokens are added to the supply each year.

While AI developers, including Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, have warned about the risks related to frontier models, Voorhees argued the industry’s focus on job displacement and cybersecurity overlooks what he sees as a more fundamental threat: the erosion of privacy as AI reshapes the relationship between people and their own thoughts.

“Perhaps it is not job losses or cybersecurity incidents that should most frighten us, but rather that our flow of consciousness is increasingly under examination—our thoughts are now constructed in tandem with and at the permission of this dystopian apparatus,” he wrote.

Voorhees said the new funding will be used to expand Venice’s platform, which provides access to leading open-source and proprietary AI models through a single interface and API, while advancing what he described as First and Fourth Amendment protections for human interaction with AI.

“We will construct the platform dedicated to private and unrestricted machine intelligence; an open, permissive port city that respects the sovereignty of its inhabitants, both human and agentic,” he said.

The announcement comes as AI privacy is drawing increased attention in Washington. Earlier this year, lawmakers introduced legislation to require warrants for AI-assisted government surveillance, while the FBI has expanded its use of AI for investigations, threat analysis, and facial recognition.