Svmuu News: Erik Voorhees, founder of Venice AI, announced on Wednesday that the company has completed its first round of external funding, raising $65 million and reaching a valuation of $1 billion. The round was led by Dragonfly, with participation from North Island Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Archetype, Liquid2 Ventures, and Morgan Creek.

Launched in May 2024, Venice AI is a privacy-focused alternative to AI chatbots, designed to avoid storing user conversations on centralized corporate servers. Voorhees stated that Venice AI has surpassed 3 million users and became profitable in the first quarter.

Voorhees said the new funding will be used to expand the Venice platform, which provides access to major open-source and proprietary AI models through a single interface and API.The annual supply of Venice AI’s native token, VVV, was reduced to 3 million on Wednesday to reward token holders who support the network by staking VVV.