Venice AI becomes a unicorn as AI privacy concerns grow
The Erik Voorhees-founded Venice AI has achieved unicorn status after raising $65 million in Series A funding at a $1 billion valuation. Led by Dragonfly and with backing from Coinbase Ventures, F-Prime, North Island Ventures, Morgan Creek and others, the funding round announced on Wednesday marks the companys first external capital raise since launching in 2024. The fundraising came in the same month Anthropic was forced to suddenly cut foreign access to two of its latest AI models, and comes just weeks after OpenAI was accused in a class-action lawsuit for sharing ChatGPT data with third parties, highlighting the potential appeal of privacy-focused AI platforms. “This capital will be used to uphold the First and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution as they relate to mankinds interaction with AI,” Voorhees said in an X post on Wednesday. The First Amendment is part of the United States Constitution protecting five essential freedoms including the freedom of speech. The Fourth Amendment protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government. Venice AI courts privacy-focused users Venice AI, which claims to have 3.5 million users, offers access to over 200 AI models but adds a proxy between the user and the models and allows users to choose the level
