LMArena announced it has raised $150 million in new financing to expand its community-driven platform for evaluating frontier AI models, valuing the company at $1.7 billion post-money. The round was led by Felicis and UC Investments, the University of California’s investment office, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, The House Fund, LDVP, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Laude Ventures.
The company positions its platform as a transparent, third-party way to measure how AI systems perform in real-world use, as adoption accelerates globally and competition among AI labs intensifies. LMArena said the new capital will support ongoing platform operations, technical hiring, and expanded research capabilities aimed at strengthening its evaluation methods.
LMArena said its community includes more than 5 million monthly users across 150 countries, generating over 60 million conversations each month. The company said that scale enables analysis of model performance across domains such as coding, textual reasoning, professional workflows in areas like law and medicine, search and citation tasks, and creative work, including image and video generation.
LMArena also said it works with major AI labs and enterprises—including OpenAI, Google, and xAI—that use its evaluations to refine models for production use cases and user preferences. The company said it generates revenue through paid evaluation services for AI labs and enterprises, targeting economically valuable industries such as software engineering, law, medicine, and scientific research.
The company said its first commercial product launched in September 2025, and that its annualized consumption run rate surpassed $30 million in December, less than four months after the launch. LMArena framed the funding as support for an approach centered on open standards, methodological rigor, and evidence drawn from diverse groups of real users.
KEY QUOTES:
“We cannot deploy AI responsibly without knowing how it delivers value to humans. To measure the real utility of AI, we need to put it in the hands of real users. LMArena does exactly this, leveraging feedback from tens of millions of consumers and professionals to set the North Star of the AI industry. Our evaluations use a transparent, open-source methodology to make these insights public for everyone. This funding accelerates the scientific work and community insights that make live evaluation from real users the gold standard for assessing AI in practice.”
Anastasios Angelopoulos, Co-Founder and CEO, LMArena
“Progress in AI can’t be measured in labs by benchmarks alone. It needs to take into account how real people want to use these systems and what they prefer. We’re leading this round because LMArena has built the most trusted, reliable, real-world signal of AI performance. They have become essential infrastructure for every lab and enterprise.”
Peter Deng, General Partner, Felicis
“Without a trustworthy way to measure performance, AI can’t be safely scaled. LMArena delivers clarity and confidence for researchers, developers and businesses. As AI adoption accelerates, LMArena’s tools are becoming critical infrastructure.”
Jagdeep Singh Bachher, Chief Investment Officer, University of California
