Erik Voorhees' Venice AI Hits Unicorn Status With $65M Dragonfly-Led Series A

Venice AI, the privacy-first AI platform founded by ShapeShift creator Erik Voorhees, is officially a unicorn. The company announced a $65 million Series A on July 1 at a $1 billion valuation — its first outside capital since launching in May 2024 — and its VVV token jumped roughly 20% on the news.

What Happened

The round was led by crypto-focused venture firm Dragonfly, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, North Island Ventures, and others. Voorhees spent two years building Venice before taking a dollar of outside equity, and the numbers explain why investors lined up when he finally did: the company says it's already profitable, with annualized run-rate revenue above $70 million from subscriptions and API access, three million active users, and about 1.7 million API calls per day.

Why It Matters

Venice's whole pitch is that it's the anti-Big-Tech AI. Prompts are encrypted client-side before they leave your device, routed through decentralized infrastructure, and never stored server-side — the platform is architected so that even Venice can't read your chat history. In a year when AI privacy concerns keep making headlines, that positioning just got a $1 billion stamp of approval.

It's also a landmark for the crypto-AI crossover trade. Venice runs a token, VVV, launched on Base, and it's one of the few projects in the category with real revenue rather than just a whitepaper and a dream. A profitable, unicorn-valued company sitting behind a token is still a rarity in this market.

What's Next

Venice says the fresh capital will go toward scaling its privacy-preserving infrastructure and expanding model access. The bigger question is whether the VVV pop holds — token markets have a habit of front-running venture milestones and fading after. But with $70 million in run-rate revenue and Dragonfly on the cap table, Venice just became the crypto-AI project everyone else gets measured against. ☕₿