LMArena was valued at $1.7B four months after its initial public offering

Pictures of LMAan initiative that launched UC Berkeley’s research project in 2023, he announced On Tuesday it raised $150 million in Series A at a cash value of $1.7 billion. The round was led by Felicis and the university’s fund, UC Investments.

The startup came out of the gate as a business with a $100 million seed around May at a cost of $600 million. This new round means they have raised $250 million in seven months.

LMArena is well known for its massively populated AI-style boardards. Its consumer website allows the user to enter the time they send to two brands, the user then chooses the brand that performed best. These results, which now serve more than 5 million users per month in 150 countries and 60 million conversations per month, the company says, promote the board. It has a variety of products for different jobs including writing, web development, vision, text and graphics, and more.

The models they test include various flavors of OpenAI GPT, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, and Grok, as well as special ones like creating graphics, text to graphics, or visualization.

The company began as Chatbot Arena, an open-source project created by UC Berkeley researchers Anastasios Angelopoulos and Wei-Lin Chiang, and was initially funded by grants and donations.

The LMArena billboards became a hot topic among model makers. When LMArena began seeking funding, it partnered with select companies such as OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic to make their popular models available for evaluation. In April, a group of competitors published a paper claiming that this allowed the modelers to play the originals, which LMArena has vehemently denied.

In September, it launched commercial operations, AI testshow businesses, modeling labs, and software developers can hire the company to review their communities. That gave LMArena an annual “risk” — as the company defines annual recurring revenue (ARR) — of $30 million as of December, less than four months after its launch.

This strategy, as well as the popularity of the founders, was enough for VCs to pile on Series A, which included participation from Andreessen Horowitz, The House Fund, LDVP, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Laude Ventures.