LMArena reached a valuation of $1.7 billion four months after launching its product

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

The startup broke out of the gate as a venture with a $100 million seed round in May at a valuation of $600 million. This new round means it has raised $250 million in about seven months.

LMArena is known for its leaderboards for crowdsourced AI model performance. The consumer website allows a user to write a prompt that they submit to two forms, and the user then chooses the form that did a better job. These results, which now include more than 5 million monthly users across 150 countries and 60 million conversations per month, fuel the leaderboards, the company says. It classifies different models for a variety of tasks including text, web development, vision, text-to-image, and other criteria.

The models it tests include different flavors of OpenAI GPT, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, and Grok, as well as those geared toward specializations like image generation, text-to-image, or inference.

The company began as Chatbot Arena, an open research project created by UC Berkeley researchers Anastasios Angelopoulos and Wei-Lin Qiang, and was originally funded through grants and donations.

LMArena leaderboards have become something of an obsession among modellers. When LMArena started generating revenue, it partnered with select modeling companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic to make their master models available for its community to evaluate. In April, a group of competitors published a research paper claiming that this helped these model makers manipulate the startup’s parameters, a claim LMArena strongly denied.

In September, it publicly launched a commercial service, AI Assessments, where organizations, model labs, and developers can hire the company to conduct model assessments through its community. This gave LMArena an annual “burn rate” — as the company describes its annual recurring revenue (ARR) — of $30 million as of December, less than four months after launch.

This trajectory, and the startup’s popularity, was enough for venture capital shareholders to participate in the Series A, which included participation from Andreessen Horowitz, The House Fund, LDVP, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Laude Ventures.