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LMArena Raises $150 Million Series A, Triples Valuation to $1.7 Billion

The UC Berkeley–born evaluator points to rapid user growth, paid assessments, growing demand for independent model testing.

Overview

  • The funding was co-led by Felicis and UC Investments with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, The House Fund, LDVP, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Laude Ventures.
  • LMArena runs a crowdsourced, blind comparison platform for large language and multimodal models, including offerings from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Grok.
  • The company reports more than 5 million monthly users across roughly 150 countries generating about 60 million conversations each month.
  • Its commercial service, AI Evaluations, launched in September and reached a company-reported annualized consumption rate of about $30 million by December.
  • LMArena says it will put the new capital into platform operations, technical hiring and research, while continuing to reject competitors’ claims that vendor ties bias its benchmarks.