Erik Voorhees’ privacy-first AI platform Venice landed a $65 million Series A at a $1 billion equity valuation, its first outside capital, after hitting profitability in Q1.
Venice, a privacy-first AI platform founded by Erik Voorhees, raised a $65 million Series A at a $1 billion equity valuation in a round led by Dragonfly. It is the company’s first outside capital since launching.
Voorhees announced the round Wednesday morning, saying Venice hit profitability in the first quarter and has become, by revenue, the largest company at the intersection of AI and cryptoeconomics. TechCrunch reported the raise makes Venice a unicorn. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong called Venice “important infrastructure for freedom.”
Equity Over Token
Venice chose to sell equity rather than tap its treasury of VVV, the platform’s native token, which is up 11.6% over the past 24 hours to $13.80, according to CoinGecko. Voorhees said the company holds more than 30 million of the roughly 80 million VVV in circulation and has not sold any tokens to date.
Series A investors received 8.98% of the company, a vesting grant of 1.5 million VVV, and an option to buy another 5 million VVV over the next eight years. Exercising that option would require investors to pay Venice an additional $66.5 million, bringing total potential proceeds to $131.5 million.
Funding the Buildout
Venice plans to use the capital to build out its own datacenters, the first time the company will own compute infrastructure rather than renting it. Voorhees said the move ensures capacity in a coming resource squeeze and increases gross margins, making room for larger revenue-funded token burns.
The rest will go toward customer growth, new markets, acquisitions and hiring as Venice pushes to become, in Voorhees’ words, “the port city for agentic civilization.”
Any VVV granted or optioned to investors is locked for a year and unlocks linearly over three additional years, meaning tokens would not reach the market until roughly two years after Venice’s token launch. Voorhees said the resulting supply release, if the full warrant is exercised, would run just under 6,000 VVV per day, about 0.2% of current daily trading volume.
The deal caps an 18-month run in which VVV traded openly before Venice brought in outside capital, a sequencing Voorhees framed as the reverse of the typical pre-sale model used by most crypto projects.