Venice AI Raises $65M at $1B Valuation to Build Privacy-First Alternative to ChatGPT

Venice, an AI platform positioning itself as a private and uncensored alternative to mainstream chatbots, has raised its first external funding round of $65 million at a $1 billion valuation.

The round was led by Dragonfly, with participation from North Island Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Archetype, Liquid2 Ventures, Morgan Creek and other investors, according to founder Erik Voorhees.

Launched just over two years ago, Venice is designed around a privacy-first architecture for human–machine interaction. Voorhees frames the product as a response to what he describes as an emerging "panopticon" of AI systems built on pervasive user surveillance.

Venice aggregates access to major generative AI models, both open-source and closed, through a single interface and API. The company says users can route workloads across these models without surrendering control over their data to a centralized provider.

Voorhees said Venice reached 3 million users in April and became profitable in the first quarter of the year, contrasting this with other AI companies he claims are burning capital while relying on intensive data collection.

The new capital will go toward expanding Venice's platform as a privacy-preserving AI layer, with an explicit focus on aligning product design with First and Fourth Amendment protections in the context of AI usage.

Venice markets itself as an "AI safety" company with a different emphasis from frontier labs focused on model risk, centering instead on user sovereignty, minimal data retention and resistance to ubiquitous surveillance in AI tooling.

With fresh funding and a reported billion-dollar valuation, the company plans to scale infrastructure, deepen its model integrations and grow its user base as demand increases for AI services that do not monetize via extensive behavioral tracking.