Market & RegulationInvestment · $40M
Vals raises $40M to redefine AI benchmarking
TechCrunch AIhigh confidence
Why it matters
- →Benchmarking is evolving from academic trivia to practical, industry-specific validation.
- →Private test sets prevent models from gaming public benchmarks, increasing metric reliability.
- →Independent evaluation is becoming a prerequisite for enterprise trust and potential IPOs.
Vals, an AI benchmarking startup founded in 2024, has closed a $40 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz. The company differentiates itself from legacy evaluation systems by testing models on complex, industry-specific tasks like law and finance rather than general knowledge tests. Co-founder Rayan Krishnan states that the private test data prevents model training against benchmarks, ensuring more accurate performance metrics. Vals is expanding its team to 25 employees and launching a program to provide evaluations for federal agencies.
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