Bombshell! After soaring 12x in half a year, $VVV secured $65 million in funding, while the team holds 30 million tokens and hasn't sold a single one—this "token-first, funding-later" masterstroke hides a counterintuitive wealth code.

First issue tokens, then raise funds. This sounds like a reversed script in the crypto world, but one project has actually done it.

Privacy AI platform Venice announced on July 1 that it completed a $65 million Series A funding round, with a post-investment valuation of $1 billion. The lead investor was Dragonfly, with participation from North Island Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Archetype, Liquid2 Ventures, and Morgan Creek. This is the first time Venice has taken external institutional equity funding since its founding over two years ago.

What is the money for? To build its own data center, no longer relying on leased GPU computing power.

At the same time, its token $VVV has skyrocketed this year. Starting from $1.62 at the beginning of the year, it hit an all-time high of $21.469 on June 3, and is now hovering around $13. The circulating market cap is approximately $600 million, with a year-to-date peak gain of over 1,200%.

More absurdly, the company became profitable in the first quarter of 2026, with an annualized revenue of over $70 million.

Equity Financing, Not Token Cash-Out

On January 27, 2025, Venice launched $VVV on the Base chain, with a total supply of 100 million tokens. The distribution method is very special: 50% airdropped—25% to approximately 100k early users, 25% to AI Agent projects such as Virtuals, Luna, aixbt, VaderAI, plus about 200 Coinbase AgentKit developers. The remaining 35% is held by Venice itself, 5% goes into the liquidity pool, and 10% serves as an incentive fund.

See it? This company did not take the traditional path of rounds of equity financing for AI startups. Instead, it first used token economics to bootstrap the community, and once the data was established, it introduced equity capital.

For a company that is already profitable and has a functioning token deflation mechanism, this money is not buying survival—it is buying cost control rights and supply chain autonomy.

In a lengthy post about the financing announcement, CEO Erik Voorhees broke down the structure of the deal: Series A investors received 8.98% equity in the company, plus a grant of 1.5 million $VVV tokens, and warrants to purchase an additional 5 million $VVV at approximately $66.5 million over the next eight years. If all warrants are exercised, the total amount expands from $65 million to $131.5 million.

Tokens from the grant and warrants are locked for one year, then linearly unlocked over three years. Even if all warrants are exercised, the additional daily circulating supply, according to Voorhees, is about 6,000 tokens, accounting for only roughly 0.2% of the current daily trading volume—dilution to the secondary market is almost negligible.

Key sentence: Voorhees emphasized that Venice is still the largest holder of $VVV, and the combined holdings of the company and team are greater than when the token was launched, and they have not sold a single token to date.

Crypto Veteran + Cloud Computing Engineer Combination

Founder and CEO Erik Voorhees is one of the earliest figures in the crypto industry, previously founding ShapeShift, and has long been a flag-bearer for Bitcoin sovereignty and anti-regulation. Venice's privacy narrative continues his consistent stance.

Co-founder, President, and CTO Jesse Proudman has over 20 years of entrepreneurial and engineering background. In 2003, he founded cloud hosting company Blue Box Group, building private clouds based on OpenStack, which was acquired by IBM in 2015. He later co-founded cryptocurrency trading platform Strix Leviathan and served as a vice president at fintech company Betterment.

In short, Voorhees provides vision and community narrative, while Proudman is responsible for turning that narrative into infrastructure that can scale.

The Price of Censorship-Free Operations

While announcing the financing, Voorhees published a long article explaining Venice's philosophy: Human thought is inherently private and uncensored, but as minds begin to merge with machine intelligence, this sovereignty is being quietly taken away by mainstream AI companies in the name of "safety." He asks: Whether it’s a lab’s board of directors or a government, who has the right to possess the power to peek into human thoughts?

This stance is a double-edged sword. Removing content moderation means Venice must bear the content liability and cross-jurisdictional regulatory pressure that comes with uncensored output. In an era where most countries are tightening regulations on AI-generated content, this is both a plus for the privacy narrative and a risk that investors and users must face.

One API Key, Access to 250+ Censorship-Free Models

Venice's core product promise: It does not log users' prompts and responses on the server side. User input is encrypted on the device, transmitted fully encrypted, and only decrypted and processed inside a certified Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). They collaborate with external TEE service providers such as NEAR AI Cloud and Phala Network. Neither the GPU computing power provider nor Venice itself can see plaintext data, and each response comes with a verifiable "remote attestation" proof.

At the same time, the platform removes a large number of content moderation mechanisms found in mainstream AI products. Privacy is not charity; it is part of the product's pricing.

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

On the product side, it also offers MCP tools, file input, web search and scraping, on-chain RPC proxy, and other capabilities for developers and AI agents, enabling direct calls to Venice's models for private coding through programming tools like Claude Code and Cursor, as well as access to Venice agents via instant messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram, and Discord.

Monetization: Free + Subscription, Crypto Payments Only 8%

Venice adopts a tiered model: The Free tier allows 10 text conversations per day; paid tiers range from Pro ($18/month) to Pro Plus, and up to the top-tier Max ($200/month, which gives 22,500 credits per month, rollable for 3 months). In addition to subscriptions, users can directly pay for API calls using USDC on the Base chain without registering an account—designed specifically for automated agents. However, according to reports, this crypto payment portion currently accounts for only about 8% of total revenue, with subscriptions and traditional API billing still the main sources.

$VVV is not a simple governance token either. Users who stake $VVV can mint DIEM, with each DIEM corresponding to $1 worth of API call usage per day, valid indefinitely. Even if $VVV's price fluctuates in the future, the already minted DIEM quota is unaffected; during the staking period, users can also receive approximately 80% of the regular staking yield.

Using Financial Statements to Tell the Story

The financing announcement also disclosed: By June of this year, Venice had approximately 3.5 million registered users, processing an average of about 1.7 million API calls per day, with a monthly processing volume of tokens reaching the trillion level.

While many AI companies in the industry are still telling stories about scale and vision, Venice chooses to tell its story through financial statements. After deploying its own computing power, whether it can maintain "privacy" and sustainable cost advantages will be the real test in the next phase.

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