What Venice is
Venice is a privacy-first AI platform providing unrestricted access to the world's frontier and open-source models across text, image, video, code and audio. It offers anonymized access to models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, alongside fully private access to the Grok suite by xAI and leading open-source models. Conversations aren't logged and user data isn't used for training. Venice is reachable through its app, its API, and permissionlessly via staking.
The traction
Two years after launch, Venice serves more than 3 million users and averages 1.7 million API calls per day across 200+ models.
Annualized revenue: $14M in January 2026, $71M on 2 July 2026, past $100M in August 2026. Headcount: roughly 33.
Why we invested in the Series A
Privacy is usually sold as a feature and priced as a compromise. Venice treats it as the product, and the revenue curve says users will pay for it rather than settle for the surveilled default. The team has done that at a size most companies would consider a rounding error, which tells us the architecture and the demand are both real rather than bought.
Founder and CEO Erik Voorhees has spent more than a decade building tools that let people move and manage money freely and privately, including ShapeShift. Co-founder, President and CTO Jesse Proudman brings nearly three decades of large-scale infrastructure work, including Blue Box Group, acquired by IBM, and Makara, acquired by Betterment. He architects the systems that make private AI possible at scale.
What's next
Banyan Ventures Fund II will continue to back outlier, AI native startups at the earliest of stages. We're excited to welcome Venice AI to our portfolio, to finally deliver on the promise of fully private AI.
