LMARena is valued at $1.7 billion four months after launching its product

LMARenaa startup that originally started as a research project at UC Berkeley in 2023, was announced on Tuesday it raised a $150 million Series A at a $1.7 billion post-money valuation. The round was led by Felicis and the university’s fund, UC Investments.

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

LMARena is best known for its leading abundance AI model performance charts. Its consumer site allows a user to type in a prompt that it sends to two models, with the user then choosing which model did a better job. Those results, which now cover more than 5 million monthly users in 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 conversion, and other criteria.

The models it tests include various flavors of OpenAI GPT, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, and Grok, as well as models geared toward specialties such as image generation, text-to-image, or reasoning.

The company started as Chatbot Arena, an open research project built by UC Berkeley researchers Anastasios Angelopoulos and Wei-Lin Chiang, and was initially funded through grants and donations.

LMARena leaderboards have become something of an obsession among model builders. When LMARena began pursuing revenue, it partnered with select modeling companies such as OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic to make their flagship models available to its community for evaluation. In April, a group of competitors published a document claiming that it helped these model makers game the startup’s benchmarks, a claim that LMARena vehemently denied.

In September, it publicly launched a commercial service, AI reviewsin which businesses, model labs, and developers can hire the company to conduct model reviews through its community. That gave LMARena an annualized “burn rate” — how the company describes its annual recurring revenue (ARR) — of $30 million as of December, less than four months after launch.

That trajectory and the startup’s popularity were enough for VCs to pile in for Series A, which included participation from Andreessen Horowitz, The House Fund, LDVP, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Laude Ventures.