Venice AI has become a $65 million Series A unicorn with the launch of its privacy-minded AI platform

Concerns about the impact of AI-powered chatbots Mental healthpersonal safety, harassmentand misinformation It forced AI developers to implement safeguards to better control how their AI models respond or do.

But worries and concerns cannot erode demand. AI offers a lot of promise, and people don’t want a faceless technology company to limit their access to these capabilities. And if they can maintain their privacy while using AI models however they want, why not?

Venice AIwhich provides access to more than 200 AI models while allowing users to maintain their privacy, is taking advantage of this demand. Just two years later, the company already has more than 850,000 unique visitors to its website, serving more than 3 million active users and an average of 1.7 million API calls per day.

The startup hosts “uncensored” open source models in its own data centers, and routes queries to closed source models, such as OpenAI or Anthropic models. All user input is encrypted and unencrypted on the client side, and is routed through an external proxy before being processed and returned, with no data stored on the gun’s own systems. It also offers end-to-end encryption on some models, although you have to pay for a subscription to get this feature.

The company is already profitable, with annual revenue at a run rate of more than $70 million, CEO Erik Voorhees (pictured above, center) told TechCrunch during an exclusive interview.

Understandably, investors flocked to get a piece of this momentum. Venice AI said Wednesday it has raised a $65 million Series A at a $1 billion valuation, its first external fundraising. The round was led by cryptocurrency-focused Dragonfly, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, North Island Ventures and others.

It’s hard to miss the overlap between Voorhees, Venice’s focus on privacy, and its new cryptocurrency investors, especially given the CEO’s background and previous work. Voorhees, an early advocate of Bitcoin, has founded a number of cryptocurrency companies, including Bitcoin gambling site Satoshi says And exchange cryptocurrencies Change shapeand has always advocated maintaining user privacy.

In reality, When a Wall Street Journal investigation accused ShapeShiftwhich initially did not require its users to identify themselves, to process millions in suspicious funds, Voorhees reportedly said: “I don’t think people should have to register their identities to catch the occasional criminal.”

He made a similar observation when asked how Venice AI thinks about providing access to AI models in this light Recent cases of artificial intelligence psychosis And the resulting damage, saying his team treats their service as a “neutral tool or neutral platform.”

“This is the same principle as Bitcoin, where Bitcoin, as a neutral protocol, works the same way for all people,” he said. “I think it’s actually very dangerous from a safety perspective, for the world to enter this next phase and constantly monitor everyone. To me, that’s actually much more dangerous than a certain person asking a controversial question or something that could be considered bad.”

There is a huge focus on giving users power as well. Users can freely choose from AI models that can generate text, images, audio, and video – all of which vary in their performance, quality, and amount of censorship applied. The website prominently features several AI “personalities” that you can customize and chat with, and the company proudly states that it offers an “uncensored” experience.

“We’re improving freedom and actually respecting users as adults, which I think is rare these days,” Voorhees said.

The founder said Venice is also working on system prompts for some open forms to guide them to answer more explicitly, though it doesn’t add any restrictions to the forms.

Unsurprisingly, there are two cryptographic codes associated with this effort. Venice launched a token called “VVV” in early January, in an attempt to attract users, and in August last year it added another token called “DIEM,” Voorhees said. Users can purchase VVV and then stake it in the DIEM mint, which generates $1 worth of AI credits per day that you can spend in the gun. However, Voorhees said that only about 8% of the company’s users pay in cryptocurrencies.

The founder attributed the company’s growth to the good performance of the cryptocurrency tokens, although he said the stronger engine was approaching feature parity with ChatGPT. “When we launched, we were very far from what ChatGPT could do, but people were using us because it was private. Today, we are very close to what ChatGPT can do (…) so as we close that gap, it becomes an increasingly compelling alternative,” he said.

Looking to the future, Venice AI wants to use the new money to start purchasing GPUs and building its own data centers so it can stop leasing GPUs and increase overall profit margins.