Venice raises $65M Series A at $1B for private, uncensored AI access

The round closed July 1, 2026, and it is the first outside capital since launch in 2024. Dragonfly led, with Coinbase Ventures, North Island Ventures, F-Prime, Archetype, Liquid2 Ventures and Morgan Creek taking part. Investors received 8.98% of the equity, a vesting grant of 1.5 million VVV tokens, and warrants for 5 million more VVV over eight years. Full exercise would pay Venice about $66.5 million and lift total capital to roughly $131.5 million. Reported metrics include more than 3 million active users and about 1.7 million daily API calls. Venice hosts open-source models on its own infrastructure with no data retention, and routes requests for closed models from providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic through encrypted routing. Proceeds are earmarked for GPUs and proprietary data centers to cut reliance on leased compute. Only about 8% of users pay in crypto, so the token is a smaller part of revenue than the structure suggests. For AI founders, the deal tests whether privacy and permissive access can support a profitable business without training a frontier model. The dependency is also visible: premium queries rely on closed-model APIs, so changes to those providers' data terms would affect the pitch. Pairing equity with token warrants is a financing structure worth watching for teams with a community token.