LMArena, a startup that initially launched as a UC Berkeley analysis venture in 2023, announced on Tuesday that it raised a $150 million Collection A at a post-money valuation of $1.7 billion. The spherical was led by Felicis and the college’s fund, UC Investments.
The startup bolted out of the gate as a industrial enterprise with a $100 million seed round in May at a $600 million valuation. This new spherical means it raised $250 million in about seven months.
LMArena is finest identified for its crowdsourced AI mannequin efficiency leaderboards. Its client web site lets a consumer kind a immediate that it sends to 2 fashions, with the consumer then selecting which mannequin did a greater job. These outcomes, which now span greater than 5 million month-to-month customers throughout 150 international locations and 60 million conversations a month, the corporate says, gasoline the leaderboards. It ranks varied fashions on quite a lot of duties together with textual content, internet growth, imaginative and prescient, text-to-image, and different standards.
The fashions it exams embody varied flavors of OpenAI GPT, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, and Grok, in addition to ones which might be geared towards specialties like picture technology, textual content to picture, or reasoning.
The corporate started as Chatbot Enviornment, an open analysis venture constructed by UC Berkeley researchers Anastasios Angelopoulos and Wei-Lin Chiang, and was initially funded by way of grants and donations.
LMArena’s leaderboards turned one thing of an obsession amongst mannequin makers. When LMArena began pursuing income, it partnered with choose mannequin firms corresponding to OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic to make their flagship fashions obtainable for its group to guage. In April, a group of competitors published a paper alleging that this helped these mannequin makers recreation the startup’s benchmarks, an allegation LMArena has vehemently denied.
In September, it publicly launched a industrial service, AI Evaluations, by which enterprises, mannequin labs, and builders can rent the corporate to carry out mannequin evaluations by way of its group. This gave LMArena an annualized “consumption price” — as the corporate describes its annual recurring income (ARR) — of $30 million as of December, lower than 4 months after launch.
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That trajectory, and the startup’s reputation, had been sufficient for VCs to pile in for the Collection A, which included participation from Andreessen Horowitz, The Home Fund, LDVP, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Enterprise Companions, and Laude Ventures.
