Darth Venamis was a prospective Sith Lord of the lineage of Darth Bane. A male Bith, he was the Sith apprentice of the Dark Lord, Darth Tenebrous. Tenebrous trained Venamis in violation of the Rule of Two, since he had another apprentice, Darth Plagueis. Despite Venamis's use of the Sith title, Darth, it was not legitimately bestowed upon him.

Venamis claimed to have been found by the Bith Dark Lord of the Sith, Darth Tenebrous, and selected as an apprentice unbeknownst to the other Banite Sith trained under Tenebrous' tutelage, the Muun Darth Plagueis. After Plagueis discovered Venamis' existence, the Muun doubted that the latter had been trained as a true Sith, thus seeing the self-bestowed title of "Darth" as illegitimate and considered the secret apprentice, who was a Bith himself, to be biologically related to their common master, possibly as an offspring.
Around the year 67 BBY, Venamis posed as a physician, using fraudulent information regarding place of residence and practice, to free the Nautolan Naat Lare from the Bedlam Institution for the Criminally Demented on Bedlam who had been incarcerated there three years before in 70 BBY. The Bith then tasked his potential apprentice to cull the population of marsh haunts near a Barabel settlement on Abraxin.
After Tenebrous died on Bal'demnic at the hands of Plagueis in 67 BBY, the latter discovered that Venamis kept a list of certain Force-sensitive beings as potential apprentices of his own—other than Lare, they were a Shi'ido changeling who worked as a professional gambler and the Iktotchi prophet of Saleucami, as well as a being who had been executed, another being that had been previously killed in a barfight, and one other being who had died of natural causes by that point. However, before Venamis could pursue his own agenda, he moved to fulfill Tenebrous' final command to eliminate Plagueis, leaving Lare on Abraxin.

Traveling to Sojourn—a moon owned by Plagueis and maintained as a personal retreat—Venamis was bested in a duel and forced to ingest a coma-bloom, a poisonous species of flora, putting him into a coma. As part of his experiments with midi-chlorians over the following decades, Plagueis and his droid 11-4D kept the comatose Venamis alive to manipulate and study. Around the year 42 BBY, Venamis was eventually allowed to die by Plagueis, his usefulness finally fulfilled. Afterward, he was resurrected and killed again and again in the presence of 11-4D, as well as Plagueis's apprentice, Darth Sidious, until Venamis' organs finally ceased to function and Plagueis finally allowed the Bith to die for the final time.
In his duel with Plagueis, Darth Venamis demonstrated a superior offensive skill in lightsaber combat taught to him by his master, Darth Tenebrous. He also shared his master's enjoyment of fighting. Tenebrous had well trained Venamis, and he proved to be a capable fighter. Tenebrous made sure Venamis was an expert in Plagueis' style of lightsaber combat, Venamis even landing a strike at the side of Plagueis' neck. And so in their fight, Plagueis resorted to moving himself like a marionette and reacting to Venamis' moves. After Plagueis started this unorthodox course of action he gradually realised the fight started to seem more like a training exercise than fight to the death. Unfortunately for Venamis this led him to become more sloppy and less precise, a cost that led to his defeat at Plagueis' hands.
Venamis could also generate Force lightning, as Plagueis sensed him about to do so, before he crossed his blades to Venamis's neck, and caused him to "yield." Among his talents, was also the difficult ability to levitate himself, doing so when Plagueis used the Force to break the greel branch he was perching on, and suspended himself in midair and continued the duel using that ability. Prior to the duel Venamis had also cloaked his connection to the dark side, Plagueis commended him for hiding that connection, although Plagueis could still sense the Force within him. Despite his skill with a lightsaber and the Force, Venamis still failed to sense the death of his master, Darth Tenebrous, even mocking Plagueis when he thought he was lying.
Darth Venamis first appeared in the 2012 novel Darth Plagueis, written by James Luceno. The novel tells the backstory of Darth Plagueis. It revealed that Venamis was Darth Tenebrous' secret apprentice.