LMArena Secures $100M Seed Funding, Valued at $600M for AI Model Evaluation Platform

LM Arena, the organization behind popular AI leaderboards, lands $100M | TechCrunch

LM Arena, a crowdsourced benchmarking project that major AI labs rely on to test and market their AI models, has raised $100 million in a seed funding round that values the organization at $600 million, according to Bloomberg. Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and UC Investments, which manages an investment portfolio for the University of California, led the fundraising. Lightspeed Venture Partners, Felicis Ventures, and Kleiner Perkins also participated. Founded in 2023, LM Arena has become something of an AI industry obsession. Primarily run by UC Berkeley-affiliated researchers, LM Arena has partnered with companies such as OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic to make flagship models available for its community to evaluate. LM Arena was previously funded through a combination of grants and donations, including from Google's Kaggle data science platform, a16z, and Together AI. Recently, it's been accused by some researchers of helping top AI labs game its leaderboard -- accusations that LM Arena has vehemently denied.

LMArena Goes From Academic Project to $600 Million Startup

Chatbot Arena started as an academic project, where researchers and students at the University of California at Berkeley worked to evaluate the capacity of artificial intelligence tools. Now, the group has spun out into a new company, called LMArena, that's raised $100 in seed funding from a slate of A-list investors. Andreessen Horowitz and UC Investments -- which manages an investment portfolio for the University of California -- led the fundraising, which the company plans to announce Wednesday. The deal includes backing from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Felicis Ventures and Kleiner Perkins, among others, the company said.

AI Benchmarking Platform LMArena Raises $100 Mn in Funding | AIM

What started as an academic project is now reportedly valued at $600 million. LMArena, an open community platform for evaluating the capabilities of AI models, announced on Wednesday that it has raised $100 million in seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and the University of California (UC) investments. This values the project at $600 million, as reported by Bloomberg. The platform ranks models by allowing users to pose queries to two anonymous chatbots and voting for the best responses until they find a winner. Since its inception, the platform has completed over four hundred model evaluations, with more than 3 million votes cast by users. LM Arena also announced an update to its user interface and performance improvements across the platform. "This funding isn't just about scaling infrastructure, it's about supporting the community that makes LMArena possible," said LMArena on X. "We're doubling down on what matters: improving the diversity of our voters; more methodological research like style control and prompt-to-leaderboard; more modalities; more open data." Previously known as Chatbot Arena, this initiative began as a research project by UC Berkeley students and researchers. "We invested in LMArena because the future of AI depends on reliability," said Anjney Midha, general partner at a16z. "And reliability requires transparent, scientific, community-led evaluation. LMArena is building that backbone," he added. The platform also provides a leaderboard of the best-performing AI models across various domains, including language, vision, web development, text-to-image, search, and more. Currently, the platform ranks Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro first in the language category. Numerous AI companies globally highlight their models' abilities by citing their scores on LMArena.

LMArena raises $100M at $600M valuation to expand AI benchmarking platform - SiliconANGLE

LMArena raises $100M at $600M valuation to expand AI benchmarking platform LMArena, the company behind artificial intelligence testing service Chatbot Arena, has raised $100 million in seed funding, marking one of the largest seed rounds in the AI sector to date. According to Bloomberg, the round was raised on a valuation of $600 million, a highly impressive amount given it only launched as a standalone company after being spun out of a University of California, Berkeley project in April. LMArena operates as a neutral benchmarking platform that enables users to compare large language models through head-to-head matchups. It works by allowing users to submit prompts and evaluate anonymous responses from different models, selecting the best reply. The result is that the service offers a crowdsourced comparison method and unbiased rankings that reflect actual, real-world user preferences. The company's platform has become the main and arguably one of the best ways for both researchers and commercial AI developers to compare models. Major AI companies, including OpenAI, Google LLC and Anthropic PBC submit their models to LMArena to showcase performance and gather community feedback. LMArena's success and how it managed to gain a $600 million valuation in its first round are tied to the transparency and neutrality it brings to evaluating AI models in a rapidly growing sector. By not favoring any specific company or model, the platform has attracted participation from nearly every major company and lab that is developing large language models, giving it industry-wide relevance and legitimacy. Per Bloomberg, investors were drawn to LMArena's clear value proposition and the growing demand for third-party benchmarking as generative AI adoption expands. LMArena's ability to generate detailed performance comparisons without the need for direct integration into third-party systems makes it highly scalable. The funding will reportedly support platform expansion and the development of new domain-specific evaluation tools to meet increasing demand. "We believe evaluations are more important now than when we started," Ion Stoica, LMArena co-founder and executive chairman, told Bloomberg. Andreessen Horowitz and UC Investments led the round, with Lightspeed Venture Partners LP, Felicis Ventures Management Company and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers also participating.

Chatbot Arena Raises $100 Million for Platform That Compares AI Models | PYMNTS.com

Chatbot Arena raised $100 million in seed funding to support its platform that helps users compare the performance of different artificial intelligence models. The company also said in a Wednesday (May 21) post on social platform X that it plans to relaunch the platform, LMArena, with a new look based on feedback from members of its community. "We're focused on building a neutral, open, community-driven platform that helps the world understand and improve the performance of AI models on real queries from real users," Chatbot Arena said in the post. The LMArena leaderboard enables users to vote on which AI chatbot generates the best responses to prompts, PYMNTS reported May 6. Chatbot Arena's seed funding round was led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and the University of California's UC Investments, according to the company's LinkedIn post. Anjney Midha, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said in a Wednesday post on X that Chatbot Arena's mission is "solving AI reliability at scale." "It's one of the most urgent, difficult and valuable problems for humanity to solve, and I can't imagine a better team than [Chatbot Arena co-founders Ion Stoica, Wei-Lin Chiang and Anastasios Nikolas Angelopoulos] leading the way," Midha said in the post. The company's website became a popular destination for early adopters of AI, as it lets people test AI models, see how they perform in head-to-head comparisons, vote for the ones they prefer and see how they are ranked on the site's leaderboards, per the report. Chatbot Arena will use the new funding to grow the platform, hire more people, add features and conduct research, according to the report. "The reality is that it's outgrown an academic project," Angelopoulos said, per the report.