Vals AI raises $40 million in Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz

Vals AI, an AI evaluation startup, said it has raised $40 million in Series A funding at a post-money valuation of $400 million. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with existing investors 8VC, Pear VC, and Bloomberg Beta participating again. New investors in the round include HRT Ventures and Next Ladder Ventures. Founded by Rayan Krishnan and Langston Nashold, the company positions itself as an independent evaluator and scorekeeper for large language models. Vals AI works with experts in law, finance, healthcare, and coding to score model outputs in real business settings, while limiting access to its private test sets to reduce benchmark gaming and training directly to the test. The company said its evaluation results have been included in model cards from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and xAI, and that enterprise customers use those results to choose models for production deployments. Vals AI also said its 2025 revenue grew 8x year over year, its customer count doubled, its team tripled in six months, and it launched the code evaluation tool Vals Smith, frontier risk evaluations, and Vals Index 2.0 for expanded economic measurement.