Venice raises $65M at $1B valuation for private, uncensored AI
Privacy-focused artificial intelligence company Venice.ai Inc. today revealed that it has raised $65 million in new funding that values the startup at $1 billion.
Venice pitches itself as a private and unrestricted alternative to mainstream chatbots such as ChatGPT. It was founded in 2024 by Erik Voorhees, the cryptocurrency entrepreneur behind the ShapeShift exchange, and Jesse Proudman, an entrepreneur who earlier sold cloud company Blue Box Group to IBM Corp.
The service routes queries to more than 200 open-source and proprietary models spanning text, image, video and audio through a single interface and application programming interface. Unlike most providers, Venice says, it does not log prompts, storing conversations on the user’s own device rather than its servers, and it strips out many of the content filters built into competing tools.
The design is deliberate, according to the company. With no central store of prompts and responses, there is nothing to breach, subpoena or sell. “Venice’s mission is to protect [intelligence] from mass surveillance and censorship,” said Chief Executive Voorhees, who argues that the surveillance of users’ thoughts, rather than model capability or job displacement, is becoming the industry’s defining risk.
