Vals Raises a $40M Series A Led by Andreessen Horowitz to Become AI's Benchmarking Standard

Benchmarking startup Vals closed a $40 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz "last month," TechCrunch reports. The article discloses no valuation for the round.

What the company does

Per TechCrunch, Vals was formed in 2024; co-founder Rayan Krishnan is 25, previously interned at Palantir, and worked at Microsoft and Stanford's AI lab as an undergraduate. Unlike many public benchmark suites, Vals does not disclose its specific test materials, and instead evaluates whether models can complete real tasks within specific industries such as law, finance, and coding. "What we're doing is actually looking at what are the real impacts of the models," Krishnan said. "Can they do work that produces a product of the same quality as a human within every domain?" The company says it is also building benchmarks for recursive self-improvement, mental health, cybersecurity, biosecurity, and the law of armed conflict (applying the Geneva Convention to models).

Business model and growth

Companies pay Vals to test their models; Krishnan likens the revenue model to a student paying the College Board to take the SAT. Per TechCrunch, Vals's revenue is currently eight times what it was last year; the team has tripled from eight people at the start of the year to 25, with plans to add 10 to 15 more, and the company recently launched a program providing model evaluations to federal agencies. Its earlier seed round was led by 8VC and Bloomberg Beta.

Why it matters

TechCrunch argues that as AI companies go public, third-party evaluation is becoming a key input to model procurement and disclosure; Krishnan's stated ambition is for these benchmarks to become central to how AI companies "submit public filings or talk about prospective investments." To be explicit: the round's valuation and terms were not given in the article, and this site does not speculate about them.