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LMArena $150M Series A at $1.7B Valuation

Date: January 6, 2026
Company: OpenAI
Category: Policy, Business & Society

Narrative

Raised $150M led by Felicis & UC Investments. Valuation nearly 3x from May 2025 seed ($600M). Platform at $30M ARR, 5M MAU, 60M conversations/month.

PR Newswire

Reality

Funding confirmed. Platform became de facto leaderboard for model comparison. Used by OpenAI, Google, xAI, Anthropic. Blind pairwise methodology trusted industry-wide.

Implication

Validated third-party AI evaluation infrastructure. Crowdsourced testing became industry standard. $1.7B valuation shows evaluation is critical business.

Tags

  • funding
  • infrastructure