Venice AI Crosses Unicorn Status as Voorhees Declares Independence from the Surveillance Chatbot Empire 🚢

Venice AI has raised $65 million in its first outside funding round at a $1 billion valuation, founder Erik Voorhees announced Wednesday. The company is building a privacy-focused alternative to mainstream artificial intelligence chatbots such as ChatGPT, designed to operate without storing user conversations on centralized company servers. Venice AI launched in May 2024 and reported reaching 3 million users in April. Voorhees said Venice became profitable in the first quarter in "an environment where AI firms were losing money while spying on you."

The round was led by Dragonfly, with participation from North Island Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Archetype, Liquid2 Ventures, and Morgan Creek. Voorhees described the mission in a post on X, writing, "This aversion to ubiquitous centralized surveillance and control is our philosophical foundation, and upon it Venice is growing rapidly." Voorhees is best known as the founder of the ShapeShift exchange.

Venice AI native token (VVV) rose following the funding announcement. According to CoinGecko, VVV was trading at $13.74, up 11% over the prior 24 hours. VVV emissions were also trimmed Wednesday to 3 million per year, tokens awarded to holders who stake VVV to support the network, reducing the rate of new supply entering circulation.

Voorhees said the capital will be used to expand Venice's platform, which routes 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 agent," he wrote.

Voorhees framed the privacy stakes as distinct from concerns voiced by other AI developers, including Anthropic's Dario Amodei and OpenAI's Sam Altman. "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," Voorhees wrote.