The main AI platform for privacy protection, Venice AI, completed $65 million in round A, valued at $1 billion. This is the first time that a company has introduced external funding. TechCrunch reported that the current round was supported by encrypted wind for Dragonfly and by Coinbase Ventures and North Island Ventures.
The company claims to have made a profit
Venice AI was established for only two years. According to the company, the platform currently provides more than 200 AI models, with a cumulative number of independent visitors to the website of more than 850,000, active users of more than 3 million and daily API calls of about 1.7 million. Its products cover text, images, audio and video generation.
The company CEO Erik Voorhees stated to TechCrunch that Venice AI was profitable and had an annualized income running rate of over $7 million. By this calibre, the company already has a strong user growth and commercialization capability before completing its first round of external financing.
It's about privacy and open use.
Venice AI sells "priority of privacy". The company hosts the open-source module of its own data centre and forwards requests to closed-source models such as OpenAI and Anthropic. According to the company, user input is encrypted and forwarded for processing through an external agent, and the platform does not maintain the relevant data itself.
Some models also provide end-to-end encryption, but this feature requires subscription fees. Apart from privacy protection, Venice AI also emphasizes that users are free to choose different models. According to the company, the system hints for some open source models would be adjusted to allow the model to provide a more open answer, without adding additional restrictions.
The new funds will go to GPU.
Vince AI also issued two platform-related tokens. The company launched VVV in January this year and the DIEM in August last year. Users can buy and pledge VVV to make DIEM; DIEM can generate $1-a-day AI usage for consumption on the Venice platform.
However, Voorhees indicates that only about 8% of the users currently pay in encrypted currency. At the same time, he said that the token performance had been instrumental in the platform ' s growth, but the more central driving factor was that product capacity had come closer to ChatGPT.
The company indicated that the new funds would be used mainly for the procurement of GPUs and the construction of its own data centre. Evenice AI is still partially dependent on the lease. A shift to more self-built infrastructure is expected to lead to an increase in corporate Māori rates.