In January 2018, I left IBM to start a crypto company. I described the space at the time as “the wild west” (it was): nascent technology, uncertain future, enormous possibility for those willing to get in early.
I felt that same pull when we started building Venice in 2024.
My career has orbited one idea for 25 years: building infrastructure that lets people operate freely and without forced surveillance. Blue Box was hosting infrastructure so companies could run their own private clouds. Crypto was financial infrastructure that took power back from intermediaries.
Venice is intelligence infrastructure for a world that’s rapidly surrendering the privacy of its own mind.
The conviction behind Venice was simple (and a little uncomfortable, given how obvious it felt).
Every AI company was building the same thing: all-seeing systems that watch you think. They raised hundreds of billions to construct the infrastructure of surveillance and called it “safety.” Meanwhile, your most intimate creative process, your exploration of ideas, your unvarnished curiosity all happen under observation.
We thought there should be another option.
Venice launched as a private, unrestricted alternative. No surveillance. No permission structure around what you’re allowed to ask, think, or create. Your conversation with an AI should feel like the inside of your own mind: private until you decide to share.
That’s how all intelligence evolved. Biological intelligence is private by default. You think, then you selectively reveal. We don’t see why merging with silicon should abandon that foundation. Erik laid out the full philosophical case in his post today. I want to talk about what we’re building.
In April, Venice hit 3 million users. As of Q1, we’re profitable. We proved product-market fit before bringing in a single outside investor.
Today, we announced our $65M Series A at a $1B valuation. Dragonfly led the round, with North Island Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Archetype, Morgan Creek, Liquid2 Ventures, Founders Coop and more.
The capital goes toward one thing: scale.
We’re building Venice into a mass-market consumer brand, an AI platform for hundreds of millions of people and billions of AI agents. Some of the capital will vertically integrate compute, starting with a small datacenter buildout. That gives us capacity in the coming resource squeeze and improves margins. (Infrastructure work is, for better or worse, the thing I keep ending up doing.)
Here’s what Venice is becoming.
The port city of AI. Every leading generative AI model in the world, open or closed, accessible through a single interface or a single API key. A safe harbor where models and the people who use them can interact freely, without surveillance, without permission structures deciding what’s acceptable.
Port cities have always been the natural crossroads of commerce and culture. The historical Venice was the gateway between East and West for centuries. Whatever flowed through, flowed relatively freely.
We’re building the same thing for the age of machine intelligence.
Three principles define what we’re building:
Free speech and discovery. You should be able to explore any idea, ask any question, generate any content, without a corporate intermediary or politicians deciding what’s permissible. The models exist to serve you, not to moderate you.
A safe harbor for models and consumers. Open-source models, closed models, fine-tuned models. All are welcome. Your interaction with AI shouldn’t come with terms and conditions on what you’re allowed to think, create, research or build.
Individual sovereignty and creative expression. This is the core. Your intelligence, biological or augmented by silicon, belongs to you. Nobody watches. Nobody constrains. What you create, why you create it, how you explore it: this is yours.
I think about this a lot in the context of my kids. They’re growing up in a world where the default relationship with AI is surveillance by default. Every thought they have in conversation with a machine gets witnessed, logged, and mediated by a company that decides what’s okay.
I don’t want them to live in that world.
Venice is the alternative. A platform where your mind stays yours.
We’re scaling private and unrestricted intelligence. Come build with us.