Arena, the crowdsourced AI model ranking platform that began in 2023 as a research project at UC Berkeley, has secured a $200 million Series B at a $3.1 billion valuation. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Salesforce Ventures, 01 Advisors, Dell Technologies Capital, Endeavor Catalyst, a16z and Felicis, among others. The valuation has nearly doubled in about ten months since its $150 million Series A at $1.7 billion in January, and the company reached $100 million in annualized revenue in June, up from $30 million at the time of that earlier round.
Arena’s free consumer platform lets users submit prompts or vibe-coding requests and rate which model performs better, drawing what the company says are tens of millions of monthly visitors. Its commercial product, AI Evaluations, provides model labs and enterprises with detailed performance analytics based on community feedback, meeting rising demand as labs discovered models were gaming standardized benchmarks.
In its announcement, Arena said AI is advancing faster than the ability to evaluate it and that the world needs a neutral third party to measure how safe and aligned models are in real use. It has added an alignment leaderboard ranking models on unauthorized actions, false attribution and deceptive completion, with OpenAI models currently leading.
Featured image: Credit: Arena
