LMArena Raises $150 Million to Build the World's Most Trusted AI Evaluation Platform

With AI reaching billions worldwide, LMArena delivers transparent, real-world evaluation of frontier model performance

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 6, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- LMArena, the community platform redefining how the world measures the progress of AI, today announced it has raised $150 million in new funding, achieving a post-money valuation of $1.7 billion, nearly triple the valuation following its seed round in May 2025. Funding was 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. The raise reflects a shared conviction across the industry: AI cannot scale responsibly without transparent and continuous third-party evaluations.

This investment accelerates LMArena's mission to measure and advance the frontier of AI for real-world use, enabling developers, researchers, enterprises and everyday users to understand how models behave where it matters most: in practical, everyday tasks. LMArena will use the funding to operate its platform, expand its technical team and strengthen its research capabilities.

"We cannot deploy AI responsibly without knowing how it delivers value to humans," said Anastasios Angelopoulos, co-founder and CEO of LMArena. "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."

LMArena's community now spans more than 5 million monthly users across 150 countries, who collectively generate more than 60 million conversations every month, allowing for deep analysis of model capabilities in coding, textual reasoning, professional use cases like law or medicine, searching and citing sources, creative tasks like image or video generation, and more. This extraordinary global engagement underscores a clear shift: the world expects AI to be measurable, comparable and accountable to real people. 

"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," said Peter Deng, general partner at Felicis. "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."

Demand for trustworthy third-party evaluation has surged due to intense competition between AI labs. LMArena works with leading AI labs and enterprises, including OpenAI, Google and xAI, all drawing on LMArena's evaluations to improve their models for production use cases and user preferences. LMArena earns revenue by providing paid AI evaluation services to AI labs and enterprises that measure model performance for users across economically valuable industries like software engineering, law, medicine, scientific research and more; its first commercial product launched in September 2025. LMArena's annualized consumption run rate surpassed $30 million in December, less than four months after launching its AI evaluation product.

The company's strategy is grounded in a core belief: reliable AI requires open standards, methodological rigor and evidence derived from a diverse panel of real users.

"Without a trustworthy way to measure performance, AI can't be safely scaled," said Jagdeep Singh Bachher, the University of California's chief investment officer. "LMArena delivers clarity and confidence for researchers, developers and businesses. As AI adoption accelerates, LMArena's tools are becoming critical infrastructure."

About LMArena

LMArena is an open platform where everyone can access and interact with the world's leading AI models and contribute to AI progress through real-world feedback. Built with scientific rigor and transparency at its core, LMArena enables developers, researchers, knowledge workers and enthusiasts to compare model outputs, uncover performance differences and advance the reliability of AI systems. With a commitment to open access, reproducible methods and diverse human judgment, LMArena is building the foundation for the world to understand, shape and benefit from AI. Learn more at lmarena.ai. 

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SOURCE LMArena