Fueling the World’s Most Trusted AI Evaluation Platform

Today, we’re excited to share a major milestone in LMArena’s journey. We’ve raised $150M of Series A funding led by Felicis and UC Investments (University of California), with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, The House Fund, LDVP, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Laude Ventures. This milestone is about something much bigger than raising funding. This year we saw our community grow by over 25x alongside rapid adoption by AI labs who trust this platform as a gold-standard for evaluating real-world model performance.

Momentum Driven by the Community

Since announcing our $100M Seed round last year in May, LMArena has grown far faster than we imagined. In a matter of months, the community has contributed:

• 50 million votes across text, vision, web dev, search, video and image modalities
• 400+ new model evaluations, spanning both open and proprietary models (so many codenames!)
• 145k open-source battle data points across text, multimodal, expert and occupational categories, and more! 

These numbers represent real people shaping how AI is measured. The LMArena community has proven that real-world usage can be the backbone for scalable  infrastructure to ensure the responsible deployment of AI.

Why We Raised Now

The increased competition among AI labs has created a critical need for rigorous, reproducible evaluations. AI labs need actionable feedback on how to improve their models, and enterprises need to know which models perform best for them. Our first evaluation product launched in September, which has resulted in a huge demand for:

• Real-world performance insights
• Diverse, fresh, and expert-level data
• Rigorous science to understand human judgement
• Testing environments aligned with how people actually use AI

This momentum has resulted in strong revenue growth, and we are using the opportunity to raise money so that we can move even faster to build new features and improve our product experience for all our users. We’re focused on improving the platform for the entire community, and 2026 is shaping up to be an exciting year for both the company and everyone building with us.

Thank You to Our Community

LMArena started as a research experiment. It’s now becoming a foundational pillar for the modern AI ecosystem. To everyone who has tested, voted, reported bugs, submitted suggestions, or shared your perspective: Thank you. This work wouldn’t exist without you. We’re deeply grateful for the community’s trust and honored to serve as the voice of humans shaping and improving AI. Let’s measure and advance what the world needs next.

If you’re new here, come test with us at → lmarena.ai
Love what we do? Join the team at → lmarena.ai/jobs
Read more in our official press release → linked here
For any press inquiries contact → press@lmarena.ai