LMArena lands $1.7B valuation four months after launching its product

LMArena, a startup that originally launched as a UC Berkeley research project in 2023, announced on Tuesday that it raised a $150 million Series A at a post-money valuation of $1.7 billion. The round was led by Felicis and the university’s fund, UC Investments.

The startup bolted out of the gate as a commercial venture with a $100 million seed round in May at a $600 million valuation. This new round means it raised $250 million in about seven months.

LMArena is best known for its crowdsourced AI model performance leaderboards. Its consumer website lets a user type a prompt that it sends to two models, with the user then choosing which model did a better job. Those results, which now span more than 5 million monthly users across 150 countries and 60 million conversations a month, the company says, fuel the leaderboards. It ranks various models on a variety of tasks including text, web development, vision, text-to-image, and other criteria.

The models it tests include various flavors of OpenAI GPT, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, and Grok, as well as ones that are geared toward specialties like image generation, text to image, or reasoning.

The company began as Chatbot Arena, an open research project built by UC Berkeley researchers Anastasios Angelopoulos and Wei-Lin Chiang, and was originally funded through grants and donations.

LMArena’s leaderboards became something of an obsession among model makers. When LMArena started pursuing revenue, it partnered with select model companies such as OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic to make their flagship models available for its community to evaluate. In April, a group of competitors published a paper alleging that this helped those model makers game the startup’s benchmarks, an allegation LMArena has vehemently denied.

In September, it publicly launched a commercial service, AI Evaluations, in which enterprises, model labs, and developers can hire the company to perform model evaluations through its community. This gave LMArena an annualized “consumption rate” — as the company describes its annual recurring revenue (ARR) — of $30 million as of December, less than four months after launch.

That trajectory, and the startup’s popularity, were enough for VCs to pile in for the Series A, which included participation from Andreessen Horowitz, The House Fund, LDVP, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Laude Ventures.