LMArena lands $1.7B valuation four months after launching its product | TechCrunch

"LMArena, a startup that originally launched as UC Berkeley research project in 2023, announced on Tuesday that it raised an $150 million Series A at a post-money valuation of $1.7 billion. The round was led by Felicis and the university's fund UC Investments. The startup bolted out of the gate as a commercial venture with a $100 million seed round in May at a $600 million valuation. This new rounds means it raised $250 million in about seven months."

"LMArena is best known for its crowdsourced AI model performance leaderboards. Its consumer website lets a user type a prompt that it sends to two models, with the user then choosing which model did a better job. Those results, which now span more than 5 million monthly users across 150 countries and 60 million conversations a month, the company says, fuel the leaderboards. It ranks various models on a variety of tasks including text, web development, vision, text-to-image, and other criteria."

"LMArena's leaderboards became something of an obsession among model makers. When LMArena started pursuing revenue, it partnered with select model companies such as OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic to make their flagship models available for its community to evaluate. In April, a group of competitors published a paper alleging that this helped those model makers game the startup's benchmarks, an allegation LMArena has vehemently denied."

LMArena raised a $150 million Series A at a $1.7 billion post-money valuation, bringing total funding to $250 million within seven months. The company runs crowdsourced AI model performance leaderboards driven by over 5 million monthly users across 150 countries and 60 million conversations per month. The consumer site compares outputs by sending a prompt to two models and collecting user choices to rank models on tasks such as text, web development, vision, and text-to-image. The project originated as Chatbot Arena at UC Berkeley and later formed partnerships with major model makers while launching a commercial AI Evaluations service amid denied allegations of benchmark gaming.

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