HedgeCo.Net — Arena, the AI model evaluation platform that began as a UC Berkeley research project in 2023, has raised a $200 million Series B at a $3.1 billion valuation. The round was co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures.
Salesforce Ventures, 01 Advisors, Dell Technologies Capital and Endeavor Catalyst participated, along with existing investors including a16z, Felicis, AMP PBC, QuantumLight and The House Fund. Arena said it has exceeded $100 million in annualized revenue.
The company announced a $150 million Series A in January at a $1.7 billion post-money valuation, when its annualized revenue was $30 million, according to TechCrunch. That means its valuation has nearly doubled in about ten months.
Arena said it has evolved from human preference evaluations to measuring factuality and agentic capabilities across tasks such as coding, document analysis and creative writing. Alongside the funding, it released an Alignment Index intended to measure how AI can deviate from human values in real-world use.
For venture investors, the round highlights demand for infrastructure that sits between frontier model developers and enterprise buyers. Independent evaluation has become a commercial category of its own as companies seek benchmarks to choose among competing models and agents, and revenue growth of this kind supports rapid step-ups in valuation.