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 company's 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 of privacy they want.
For models from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and Google, the proxy obscures users IP address, account and session data. Other models offer higher levels of privacy.
“Control over intelligence is the defining fight of the coming decade,” Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly, said on Wednesday.
“Whoever owns the AI delivery stack owns a direct window into your interior life. They log all your chats, train on them, and will hand them over when asked. And in the end, they decide the terms on which you'll get to access the most powerful systems humankind has ever built.”
Voorhees said the capital will be used to further build out its own data center infrastructure, owning the GPUs that power its platform rather than being forced to rent them at higher costs.
The remaining capital will be used to grow its customer base, enter new markets, hire talent and acquire “additive businesses,” he added.
Venice Token rose 6% on Wednesday.
AI privacy concerns in spotlight
The capital raise comes amid mounting concerns over user privacy when using AI models.
Earlier this year, lawyers told Cointelegraph that a user consulting an AI for legal matters could have their chat logs used against them in court.
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In February, Ethereum Foundation AI lead Davide Crapis and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin proposed a way to use zero-knowledge proofs and other methods to ensure that a users interactions with large language models are private.
Conversations about privacy when using AI were stirred again in May, when a proposed class action was filed in California federal court accusing OpenAI of disclosing private ChatGPT user data to Google and Meta.