LMArena, a startup originally launched in 2023 as a research project at the University of California, Berkeley, announced Tuesday that it has raised $150 million in Series A at a post-money valuation of $1.7 billion. The round was led by Felicis and UC Investment, the university's fund.
The startup landed a $100 million seed round in May at a valuation of $600 million, launching it out of the gate as a commercial venture. This new round means the company has raised $250 million in about seven months.
LMArena is best known for its crowdsourced AI model performance leaderboards. The company's consumer website allows users to enter prompts to send to the two models and then choose which model gave them better results. The company says these results have helped it climb the leaderboards, with more than 5 million monthly users across 150 countries and 60 million monthly conversations. We rank different models based on different tasks including text, web development, vision, text to image conversion, and other criteria.
The models we test include various flavors of OpenAI GPT, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, and Grok, as well as specialized models such as image generation, text-to-image conversion, and inference.
The company began as Chatbot Arena, an open research project built by UC Berkeley researchers Anastasios Angelopoulos and Weilin Zhang, and was initially funded by grants and donations.
LMArena's leaderboards have become something of an obsession among model makers. When LMArena began pursuing revenue, it partnered with select model companies such as OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic to provide flagship models for the community to evaluate. In April, a group of competitors published a paper saying it helped model makers target startup benchmarks, a claim LMArena vehemently denied.
In September, the company launched AI Evavals, a commercial service that allows companies, model labs, and developers to hire the company to perform model evaluations through its community. This gave LMarena an annual “spend rate” (what the company describes as annual recurring revenue (ARR)) of $30 million as of December, less than four months after launch.
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That trajectory and the startup's popularity were enough for VCs to rush in for a Series A that included participation from Andreessen Horowitz, House Fund, LDVP, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Lord Ventures.