LM Arena, an influential organization known for its crowdsourced AI benchmarking project, has secured $100 million in seed funding. The fresh financing places the organization’s valuation at approximately $600 million.
The funding round was led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and UC Investments, the entity responsible for managing investments for the University of California. Other notable participants included Lightspeed Venture Partners, Felicis Ventures, and Kleiner Perkins.
Established in 2023 by researchers primarily associated with UC Berkeley, LM Arena has rapidly gained prominence in the artificial intelligence community. Its benchmarking leaderboards have become an essential resource for major AI labs, using LM Arena’s evaluations both to market and rigorously test their flagship AI models. Partnerships have already been established with industry giants including OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, which actively collaborate and contribute their latest models for evaluation.
Previously, LM Arena was funded through research grants and private donations from companies and organizations such as Google’s Kaggle platform, a16z, and Together AI. Recently, the organization faced allegations from some corners of the research community, accusing it of enabling prominent AI labs to manipulate benchmark rankings—accusations that LM Arena has strongly denied.
