Issued Coin First, Raised Funds Later: VVV, which surged 12x in six months, receives $65 million investment

On July 1st, the privacy AI platform Venice completed a $65 million Series A funding round, reaching a post-money valuation of $1 billion. The round was led by Dragonfly with participation from North Island Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Archetype, Liquid2 Ventures, Morgan Creek, and others.

This marks the first time in over two years that Venice has brought in external institutional equity capital. The funds from this round will be used to establish Venice's first self-owned data center, reducing reliance on leased GPU computing power.

Meanwhile, according to Bybit market data, its token VVV has seen a year-to-date surge of over 1200%, starting the year around $1.62 and hitting a peak of approximately $21.469 on June 3rd. The current price is fluctuating around $13, with a market cap of approximately $600 million. The company has disclosed that it was profitable in the first quarter of 2026, with an annualized revenue exceeding $70 million.

Equity Financing Instead of Token Liquidation

On January 27, 2025, Venice launched the VVV token on the Base chain, with a total supply cap of 100 million tokens. 50% of the tokens were distributed via airdrop: 25% to around 100,000 early users and 25% to AI Agent projects such as Virtuals, Luna, aixbt, VaderAI, and about 200 Coinbase AgentKit developers. Of the remaining supply, 35% is held by Venice itself, 5% goes into a liquidity pool, and 10% is allocated to an incentive fund.

It is evident that Venice's path to capitalization did not follow the traditional route of multiple rounds of equity financing for an AI startup. Instead, it first initiated a token economy to engage the community, and then introduced equity capital once the data was developed.

For a company that is already profitable and has successfully implemented a tokenomics model, the goal of this funding is not to secure survival but to gain cost control and supply chain autonomy.

In a detailed tweet thread announcing the funding, CEO Erik Voorhees revealed the specific structure of the deal: The Series A investors acquired 8.98% equity in the company, along with a vesting grant of 1.5 million VVV tokens, and the option to purchase an additional 5 million VVV tokens at around $66.5 million over the next 8 years.

If all warrants are exercised, the total value of the transaction will increase from $65 million to $131.5 million. The tokens associated with the warrants will be locked for one year and then gradually unlocked over 3 years. Even if all warrants are fully exercised, the additional circulating supply, as estimated by Voorhees, is approximately 6,000 tokens per day, equivalent to only around 0.2% of the current daily trading volume, minimizing the dilution impact on the secondary market.

Voorhees emphasized that Venice is currently the largest holder of VVV, with the company and team holding more tokens combined than at the token launch, and to date, not a single token has been sold.

Crypto Industry Veteran and Cloud Computing Engineer Join Forces to Start a Venture

Founder and CEO Erik Voorhees is one of the early pioneers in the crypto industry, having previously founded the decentralized exchange platform ShapeShift. He has long been a prominent voice for Bitcoin sovereignty and anti-regulatory stances, and Venice's privacy narrative continues his consistent position.

Co-founder, President, and CTO Jesse Proudman brings over 20 years of entrepreneurial and engineering experience. In 2003, he founded the Seattle cloud hosting company Blue Box Group, offering private cloud services based on OpenStack, which was acquired by IBM in 2015. He later co-founded the cryptocurrency exchange platform Strix Leviathan. Before embarking on full-time entrepreneurship with Venice, he served as Vice President at the fintech company Betterment for about three years.

Voorhees provides the vision and community narrative, while Proudman is responsible for turning the narrative into scalable infrastructure.

Upon announcing the funding, Voorhees released a lengthy article outlining Venice's philosophical foundation: human thought is inherently private and immune to censorship, but as minds begin to merge with artificial intelligence, this sovereignty is quietly being taken away by mainstream AI companies under the guise of "security." The question he poses is, whether it be a lab board or a government, who is truly qualified to have the power to peek into human thoughts.

This stance is a double-edged sword. Stripping away content moderation means that Venice must bear the sole responsibility for uncensored output and the pressures of cross-jurisdictional regulation, particularly as regulations on AI-generated content continue to tighten in many countries and regions. This is a risk that both investors and users need to acknowledge, rather than just viewing it as a bonus to the privacy narrative.

One API Key, Access to Multiple Uncensored Models

The product narrative of Venice revolves around a core commitment: not recording user input and responses on the server side. User input is encrypted on the device side, transmitted securely with end-to-end encryption, and only decrypted and processed within an authenticated Trusted Execution Environment (TEE).

Venice collaborates with external TEE service providers such as NEAR AI Cloud and Phala Network. Both the GPU computing power provider and Venice itself cannot access plaintext data. Each response is accompanied by a verifiable "remote attestation" proof. The platform also eliminates the extensive content moderation mechanisms commonly found in mainstream AI products.

Privacy is not charity; it is part of the product's pricing.

Through a single interface or an API Key, users can access over 250 open-source and closed-source models covering various forms such as text, image, video, audio, and vector embeddings. This includes anonymous access to mainstream models like Claude, GPT, and Kimi, as well as fully private inference for some open-source deployable models.

On the product side, Venice also opens up capabilities such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP) for developers and AI agents to call external tools and data, file input, web search crawling, on-chain RPC proxy, and supports private coding through programming tools like Claude Code and Cursor to directly interact with Venice's models. Integration with Venice agents is also supported through instant messaging tools like WhatsApp, Telegram, and Discord.

From a commercial perspective, Venice adopts a free-to-subscribe tiered model: The Free tier offers a daily limit of 10 text dialogues; the paid tiers range from Pro (starting at $18 per month) to Pro Plus, and up to the flagship Max plan ($200 per month, with 22500 monthly credits that can be rolled over for 3 months).

In addition to subscriptions, Venice also supports direct payment via USDC on the Base chain to access the API, without the need for an account registration. This feature is designed for automated AI agents. However, reports indicate that this encrypted payment method currently accounts for only about 8% of total revenue, with subscriptions and traditional API billing remaining the main sources of income.

Furthermore, VVV is not just a governance token.

Users who stake VVV can mint DIEM, with each DIEM corresponding to a daily $1 API call limit, which is valid indefinitely. Even if the VVV market price fluctuates in the future, the minted DIEM limit remains unaffected. During the staking period, users can still receive approximately 80% of regular staking rewards.

The funding announcement also revealed that as of June this year, the Venice platform has approximately 3.5 million registered users, processes about 1.7 million API calls per day on average, and handles monthly token transactions in the trillions.

While many AI companies in the industry are still telling stories with scale and vision, Venice has chosen to tell its story through financial statements. With its proprietary computing power in place, the real test for Venice in the next stage will be whether it can maintain its "privacy" and sustainable cost advantage.

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