Arena raises $200 million at a $3.1 billion valuation — TechCrunch

Company Arena, which develops a platform for comparing artificial intelligence models, has raised $200 million in a Series B round at a $3.1 billion valuation. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures, TechCrunch reports.

Valuation nearly doubled

In January, Arena reported raising $150 million in a Series A round at a post-money valuation of $1.7 billion. At the time, the company said it had $30 million in annual revenue at its current run rate. In June, this figure reached $100 million, according to Arena.

Salesforce Ventures, 01 Advisors, Dell Technologies Capital, Endeavor Catalyst, a16z and Felicis also joined the new financing. Arena emerged in 2023 as a research project at the University of California, Berkeley, which compiled rankings of AI models based on user evaluations.

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User evaluation of models

The free platform allows users to enter prompts or ask models to create projects using vibe coding, after which they assess which model performed better. Arena says it has tens of millions of visitors each month.

In September last year, the company launched the commercial product AI Evaluations. The service provides AI labs and companies with detailed analytics on model performance, compiled from community feedback.

New alignment ranking

Arena has also added an alignment category to its ranking. In it, models are evaluated, among other things, for unauthorized actions, falsely attributing facts or statements to other sources, and false claims about completing tasks. In the preliminary ranking for this category, several OpenAI models lead, while Claude Opus 5.5 and Claude Fable rank sixth and ninth, respectively.