Vals AI Announces Series A
- Karan Bhatia
- 1 hour ago
- 2 min read
Vals AI, the independent evaluator of artificial intelligence, led by Rayan Krishnan and Langston Nashold, has announced a $40M Series A at a $400M valuation, led by a16z, with participation from existing investors 8VC and Bloomberg Beta and new investors HRT Ventures and NextLadder Ventures.
AI progress has long followed a “hill-climbing” process: define measurable goals, identify weaknesses, and improve against them.
But model development is now outpacing the creation of reliable benchmarks. Existing tests are quickly surpassed, leaked into training data, or developed by the same companies building the models.
AI has become a trillion-dollar industry without the independent measurement infrastructure found in markets like finance and healthcare.
Labs lack credible ways to demonstrate continued model progress, while enterprises and governments need reliable methods to measure AI performance, ROI, risk, and frontier capabilities.
Vals AI was built as an independent evaluator, developing benchmarks that measure models on real-world work across fields including law, banking, engineering, and medicine.
The company partners with reference institutions, builds representative task taxonomies, and uses proprietary test sets and reproducible infrastructure to evaluate models at scale.
Vals’ results have been cited by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and xAI, while major enterprise AI deployments use its evaluations for model selection and benchmarking. Revenue has grown 8x versus all of 2025, the customer base has doubled, and the team has tripled in six months.
Alongside the funding round, Vals AI is launching three major releases:
Vals Smith: Now generally available, enabling anyone to create custom coding benchmarks from GitHub repositories, with 120 free credits.
Frontier Risk Benchmarks: Includes the RSI Index, a new cybersecurity benchmark developed with leading academics, and initial research into AI and mental health risks.
Vals 2.0: A rebuilt Vals AI platform featuring the new Vals Index, with broader coverage of AI capabilities across the economy.
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