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.