LMArena has raised $150 million in Series A funding at $1.7 billion valuation to accelerate its mission of providing robust and transparent AI evaluation tools to meet the global demand for reliable AI metrics.
The round was co-led by Felicis and UC Investments (University of California), with participation from several major venture firms, including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), The House Fund, LDVP, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Laude Ventures.
LMArena (formerly Chatbot Arena) offers a free website where you can test the world’s most powerful AI models side-by-side to see which one is actually better for your specific needs. The company operates an open, crowdsourced platform for evaluating the output quality of artificial intelligence models, such as those from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. The platform, which started as a UC Berkeley research project called Chatbot Arena, allows users to compare two anonymous AI model responses to the same prompt and vote for the better one, creating a large dataset of human preferences.
Since its inception, LMArena has evolved from a simple research project into the central judge of the AI world, making it a highly valuable piece of “digital infrastructure.” In just four months after launching its commercial products, LMArena reached a $30 million annual revenue run rate. LMArena today has over 35 million unique users a month and processes 60 million conversations a month.