Vals AI raised $40M from a16z to sell confidential, per-industry model benchmarks
TechCrunch reported on 19 September that Vals AI, founded in 2024 by 25-year-old Rayan Krishnan, closed a $40M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz after a seed from 8VC and Bloomberg Beta. The pitch is that its evaluation sets stay confidential so labs cannot train against them, spanning law, finance, coding, cybersecurity, biosecurity, mental health and law of armed conflict; labs pay to be tested, which Krishnan compares to a student paying the College Board for the SAT. Revenue is eight times last year's, headcount went from 8 at the start of the year to 25 with 10-15 more planned, and it recently launched a program giving federal agencies model evaluations. The obvious counter-argument is that a benchmark paid for by the model vendor has the same conflict as a credit rating paid for by the issuer.
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