Venice AI raises $65M Series A at a $1B valuation

In short: Venice AI says it raised $65 million in a Series A round, valuing the company at $1 billion.

What happened

Venice AI, a company that offers access to more than 200 AI models, announced a $65 million Series A funding round. A “Series A” is an early major investment round that helps a young company grow.

The round values Venice AI at $1 billion, which makes it a “unicorn” (a private company valued at $1 billion or more). The round was led by Dragonfly, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, North Island Ventures, and other investors.

Venice AI’s CEO, Erik Voorhees, told TechCrunch the company is already profitable, with annualized run-rate revenue of over $70 million. “Run-rate” is a way of estimating yearly revenue based on recent results (like projecting a full year from the last few months).

A big part of Venice AI’s pitch is privacy. The company says it does not store user prompts on its own systems and that it encrypts user input (scrambles it so others cannot read it) and routes it through an external proxy (a middleman server, like sending mail through a forwarding address).

Venice AI also offers models it describes as “uncensored,” and it lets users pick from different tools for text, images, audio, and video. It has also launched two crypto tokens, although Voorhees said about 8% of users pay with crypto.

Why it matters

Many people want AI tools, but they worry about what happens to what they type into them. Venice AI is betting that “use AI without being watched” will be a strong selling point, and this funding gives it more resources to scale up.

Venice AI said it plans to use the new money to buy more GPUs and build its own data centers. GPUs are the chips that power most AI systems (they are like the engines behind the chatbot).

Source: TechCrunch AI