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Venice CTO Jesse Proudman. (Venice Photo)
Seattle tech entrepreneur Jesse Proudman is taking another startup leap with Venice.ai, a new AI app focused on privacy and uncensored interactions that is positioning itself as an alternative to mainstream generative AI services from giants such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
Founded last year, Venice feels similar to ChatGPT, Claude, and other popular AI applications. But unlike its competitors, Venice does not store prompts or responses on its servers by using a unique privacy architecture.
“Think about it as private ChatGPT,” Proudman told GeekWire. “The thesis is that nothing that goes in or comes out of the models is logged or retained in any way by Venice.”
The app also comes without many of the guardrails put in place by competing apps. The idea is to allow users to have a more unfiltered experience with a generative AI tool.
“There’s an ideological belief here that people should have private and uncensored access to machine intelligence that hasn’t been adulterated and isn’t going to be attached to your identity forever,” said Venice COO Teana Baker-Taylor.
Venice has more than 850,000 registered users, and more than 50,000 daily active users.
Proudman is a longtime Seattle entrepreneur who previously sold cloud computing startup Blue Box to IBM. He later started Makara, a Seattle startup that helped people invest in cryptocurrency, and sold it to Betterment in 2022.
Proudman last year connected with Venice CEO Erik Voorhees, his college classmate and a well-known cryptocurrency entrepreneur who previously ran crypto exchange ShapeShift.
“There are a lot of things that people inherently want to be kept private and that don’t belong in a permanent, ongoing record,” said Proudman. “So this concept of being able to deliver that, where all of that data sits only on your devices — that was really compelling to me.”
In a blog post introducing Venice, Voorhees noted the “weird, creepy, paternalistic censorship” built into the leading AI apps.
“We don’t believe the thoughts you develop in your mind are our business to regulate and censor,” Voorhees wrote. “It follows that we don’t believe the thoughts you develop with the help of a machine mind are our business to regulate and censor, either.”
Venice employs a variety of open source models to power its service. It uses a system prompt that instructs models to “speak freely and reduce concerns about offending people,” said Proudman, the company’s CTO.
“This allows the model to feel more comfortable providing unbiased and uncensored responses,” he said.
There are some safety mechanisms built into the app to prevent abuse and illegal activity.
Venice manages its own infrastructure and deployment. Its app is free to use and charges $18 per month for unlimited prompts and other premium features.
The company also offers a private API with a unique crypto twist. It just created its own crypto token, VVV, as a way to give users access to the API without paying per request.
Those who buy and “stake” VVV — a process of “locking up” crypto — get a share of inference capacity. For example, if you stake 1% of VVV, you get 1% of Venice’s API capacity.
Proudman said Venice is the first company to tie the concept of token ownership to a share of an aggregate compute network.
“There are many companies that let you run these models via an API, but they’re all U.S. dollar pay-per-use,” he said.
Venice is bootstrapped and has about 20 employees, including four in Seattle. The executive team includes Proudman; Voorhees; and Baker-Taylor, a crypto and banking industry vet who most recently was a VP at Circle and held leadership roles at Crypto.com and Binance.
