Private AI: Venice.ai, led by crypto vet Erik Voorhees and Seattle’s Jesse Proudman, raises $65M

Venice.ai, a privacy-focused AI startup with strong Seattle ties, has raised $65 million in its first outside funding, valuing the 2-year-old company at $1 billion. 

The company positions itself as a private and unrestricted alternative to mainstream AI services, offering access to a range of open-source and commercial AI models. Venice says it doesn’t log or store users’ prompts and responses on its servers, keeping conversations on people’s own devices. It also strips out many of the content filters built into competing tools. 

The Series A round, announced Wednesday morning, was led by Dragonfly, a crypto-focused investment firm, with participation from North Island Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Archetype, Morgan Creek, Liquid2 Ventures and Seattle-based Founders’ Co-op. 

The company was founded in 2024 by crypto entrepreneur Erik Voorhees, its CEO, who runs the company from San Francisco. Voorhees founded the crypto exchange ShapeShift and has long argued against heavy government regulation of cryptocurrency.

Seattle tech veteran and serial entrepreneur Jesse Proudman is Venice’s president, CTO and co-founder. The two met as classmates at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma.

“We want Venice to be thought of in the consumer landscape on the same terms as a ChatGPT or an Anthropic,” Proudman said in an interview. “We want people to open their phones and have our app sitting alongside those apps.”

The case for privacy comes from how people are starting to use AI. As chatbots become go-to tools for sensitive matters — medical questions, legal issues, job negotiations, relationship advice — users hand over intimate details that accumulate in the databases of companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. 

That data, Proudman said, is only as safe as the company holding it.

“It only takes one breach, one disgruntled employee who is going through that data, a government subpoena, a change in government policy — and then all of that data no longer is private to you,” he said. “It can be health records, it can be legal questions, it can be job negotiations, it can be relationship advice.”

Venice’s answer is to create no central trove to breach or subpoena in the first place.

Marketing AI with fewer restrictions can make Venice more useful in some cases, but it also raises the misuse questions that lead mainstream services to build in guardrails in the first place. Proudman said Venice includes some safeguards to prevent abuse and illegal activity. 

The company nonetheless bills itself as an “AI safety company,” casting the surveillance of users’ thoughts — rather than the content of their prompts — as the greater danger. 

Proudman is based in Seattle, where he has spent more than two decades starting and selling technology companies. He founded cloud-computing company Blue Box, which IBM acquired in 2015, and crypto trading startup Strix Leviathan, acquired by hedge fund Parataxis in early 2025. Strix spun out Makara, a crypto investing startup, in 2021, and Betterment acquired Makara the following year. 

Proudman spent about three years as a VP at Betterment, where he started moonlighting on Venice in 2024 — building it nights and weekends before leaving to go full-time.

Venice says it reached 3 million users in April and turned profitable in the first quarter. 

“That hockey stick that we always hear about, and that I’ve spent 25 years trying to build companies to find, finally manifested,” Proudman said. 

Venice makes money through consumer subscriptions and paid access to its developer API. It also has its own cryptocurrency, the VVV token, which developers can buy and lock up to reserve a share of the company’s computing capacity instead of paying per use.

Proudman said Venice will use the funding to build its own data center infrastructure — owning the GPUs that power its service rather than renting computing capacity — and to invest in growth as it tries to establish itself as a mainstream consumer brand. 

The company has grown to about 45 employees, up from roughly 15 people a year ago, with six in Seattle. It operates as a remote team and doesn’t currently have an office. 

Whether Venice expands its Seattle footprint long-term may hinge on state politics. Proudman has publicly opposed Washington’s new 9.9% “millionaires tax” — a state income tax on household income above $1 million that was signed into law in March and takes effect in 2028 — and said he won’t stay in the state if it does. 

He’s pinning his hopes on a repeal campaign that backers are trying to get on the November ballot. 

“I love it here … Seattle is a unique and phenomenal place to build a company, and I’ve been building companies here my entire life,” Proudman said. “I want to see us continue to be competitive against the Bay Area.”