Vals Raises $40M Series A to Set New Standards in AI Benchmarking

Vals has raised $40 million in Series A funding, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, 8VC, and Bloomberg Beta. Founded in 2024, Vals has expanded its workforce from 8 to 25 employees this year, reflecting an 8x revenue growth compared to the previous year. Co-founder Rayan Krishnan, previously with Palantir and Microsoft, emphasized the need for benchmarks that keep pace with rapidly advancing AI models, stating, "We were seeing a bunch of new, very capable models come to market quickly, and the academic benchmarks [were] not keeping up with that frontier advance." Krishnan noted that Vals aims to assess the real impacts of AI models, questioning whether they can produce work of equal quality to humans across various domains. He also highlighted the importance of Vals’ benchmarks in guiding AI companies as they prepare for public filings and investment discussions. This funding round follows Vals' seed round last year, which was also led by 8VC and Bloomberg Beta.