LMArena, an open community platform for evaluating the best AI models, announced it has secured $100 million in seed funding led by a16z and UC Investments (University of California) with participation from Lightspeed, Laude Ventures, Felicis, Kleiner Perkins and The House Fund.
This funding coincided with the relaunch of LMArena — a faster, sharper, fully rebuilt platform designed to make AI evaluation more rigorous, transparent, and human-centered.
LMArena is building something foundational: a neutral, reproducible, and community-driven layer of infrastructure that enables researchers, developers, and users to understand how models actually perform in the real world. And over four hundred model evaluations have already been made on the platform, with over 3 million votes cast, helping shape both proprietary and open-source models across the industry, including those from Google, OpenAI, Meta, and xAI.
The new LMArena reflects months of feedback from the community and includes a rebuilt UI, mobile-first design, lower latency, and new features like saved chat history and endless chat. The legacy site will remain live for a while, but all future innovation will be on lmarena.ai.
LMArena is working with model providers to help them uncover performance trends, gather human preference data, and test updates in real-world conditions. And the company’s long-term business model centers on trust, as they look to develop advanced analytics and enterprise services while keeping core participation free and open to all.
KEY QUOTES:
“In a world racing to build ever-bigger models, the hard question is no longer what can AI do. Rather, it’s how well can it do it for specific use cases, and for whom. We’re building the infrastructure to answer these critical questions.”
Anastasios N. Angelopoulos, co-founder and CEO at LMArena
“AI evaluation has often lagged behind model development. LMArena closes that gap by putting rigorous, community-driven science at the center. It’s refreshing to be part of a team that leads with long-term integrity in a space moving this fast.”
Ion Stoica, co-founder at LMArena and UC Berkeley professor
“Our mission has always been to make AI evaluation open, scientific, and grounded in how people actually use these models. As we expand into new modalities and deepen our evaluation tools, we’re building infrastructure that doesn’t just evaluate AI, it helps shape it. We’re here to ensure AI is reliably measured through real-world use.”
Wei-Lin Chiang, co-founder and CTO of LMArena
“We invested in LMArena because the future of AI depends on reliability. And reliability requires transparent, scientific, community-led evaluation. LMArena is building that backbone.” Jagdeep Singh Bachher, chief investment officer at UC Investments, added, “We’re excited to see open AI research translated into real-world impact through platforms like LMArena. Supporting innovation from university labs such as those at UC Berkeley is essential for building technologies that responsibly serve the public and advance the field.”
Anjney Midha, General Partner at a16z
