Dragonfly Leads $65M Bet on Erik Voorhees' Venice AI as Startup Reaches Unicorn Status
Venice AI, the privacy-focused artificial intelligence platform founded by bitcoin advocate Erik Voorhees, has closed a $65 million Series A round at a $1 billion post-money valuation. Crypto venture firm Dragonfly led the round, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, North Island Ventures, Archetype, Morgan Creek Digital, and Liquid 2 Ventures. The July 1 announcement marks Venice’s first outside equity raise since launching in 2024.
Voorhees spent two years building Venice before taking outside money. The platform now counts more than 3 million active users, processes 1.3 trillion tokens per month, and handles over 1.7 million daily API calls. Venice turned profitable in the first quarter of 2026, a rare outcome in an AI industry where many firms still burn cash.
Venice positions itself against mainstream chatbots that log user prompts and store conversation history. The platform encrypts inputs client-side and does not retain conversations on its servers. Users can choose among more than 200 AI models, including open-source options with fewer content restrictions alongside closed-source models from providers like OpenAI and Anthropic.
Venice runs its own token economy built around VVV and DIEM. Users stake VVV to mint DIEM, which generates daily AI credits. The company has burned roughly 42% of VVV’s circulating supply and holds 30 million of the 80 million total tokens in its treasury.
Rather than sell treasury tokens to raise capital, Venice chose equity. Series A investors received 8.98% of the company, a vesting grant of 1.5 million VVV, and warrants to purchase up to 5 million additional VVV over eight years. If investors exercise those warrants in full, total capital raised could reach $131.5 million. The warrant tokens stay locked for a year, then unlock over three additional years. Voorhees said the structure aligns incentives without flooding the market with fresh supply. VVV jumped 12.8% following the news.
Venice plans to use the funds to build proprietary data centers, reducing reliance on leased compute and improving margins. The company also intends to expand its customer base, enter new markets, and pursue acquisitions.
Currently, only about 8% of Venice users pay with cryptocurrency, suggesting the platform’s growth increasingly comes from mainstream users rather than crypto-native early adopters.