LMArena received a valuation of $1.7B four months after launching its product

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

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

LMArena is known for its well-sourced AI model performance leaderboards. The consumer website allows users to enter directions that are sent to two models, with the user then choosing which model is better. The results, which now exceed more than 5 million users per month in 150 countries and 60 million conversations per month, the company says, fuel the leaderboard. Rank various models in various tasks including text, web development, vision, text-to-image, and other criteria.

The models we tested included various flavors of OpenAI GPT, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, and Grok, as well as those suited to specialties like image generation, text to image, or reasoning.

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

The LMArena leaderboard is an obsession among model makers. As LMArena began to pursue revenue, it partnered with select modeling companies such as OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic to create flagship models available for community evaluation. In April, competing groups publish papers claiming that this helps modelers create initial benchmarks, an accusation LMArena vehemently denies.

In September, most launch commercial services, AI evaluationwhere companies, model labs, and developers can hire companies to conduct model evaluations through the community. That gave LMArena its annual “consumption rate” — as the company describes its annual recurring revenue (ARR) — of $30 million in December, less than four months after launch.

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