Venice AI Valued at $1 Billion as Erik Voorhees Makes the Case for Private ChatGPT Rivals

Venice AI has raised $65 million in its first external funding round at a $1 billion valuation, founder Erik Voorhees announced Wednesday.

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“This aversion to ubiquitous centralized surveillance and control is our philosophical foundation, and on it Venice is growing rapidly,” Voorhees wrote. “We reached 3 million users in April, and from the first quarter, in an environment where AI companies were losing money spying on you, Venice became profitable even though they chose not to.”

Launching in May 2024, Venice AI is a privacy-focused alternative to regular AI chatbots designed to prevent users’ conversations from being stored on centralized corporate servers. The round was led by Dragonfly, with participation from North Island Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Archetype, Liquid2 Ventures and Morgan Creek.

Venice AI native token (VVV) rose after the funding announcement and is currently trading at $13.74, up 11% in the last 24 hours, according to CoinGecko. So were tourist emissions finished on Wednesday up to 3 million per year, which are awarded to token holders who use their VVV to support the network. This means that fewer tokens are added to the supply every year.

While AI developers including Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman have warned about the risks associated with frontier models, Voorhees argued that the industry’s focus on job displacement and cybersecurity ignores what he sees as a more fundamental threat: the erosion of privacy as AI reshapes the relationship between people and their own minds.

“Perhaps it is not job losses or cybersecurity incidents that should scare us most, but rather that our stream of consciousness is increasingly under scrutiny – our thoughts are now being constructed in conjunction with and with the consent of this dystopian apparatus,” he wrote.

Voorhees said the new funding will be used to expand Venice’s platform, which provides access to leading open-source and proprietary AI models through a single interface and API, while advancing what he described as First and Fourth Amendment protections for human interaction with AI.

“We will build a platform dedicated to private and unrestricted machine intelligence; an open, tolerant port city that respects the sovereignty of its inhabitants, both human and agents,” he said.

The announcement comes as AI privacy is attracting increasing attention in Washington. Earlier this year, lawmakers introduced legislation requiring arrest warrants for AI-enabled government surveillance, while the FBI has expanded the use of AI for investigations, threat analysis and facial recognition.