Vals AI raises $40 million in Series A at a $400 million valuation

Vals AI, a company focused on evaluating AI models, has raised $40 million in a Series A round at a $400 million valuation, according to ChainCatcher. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z, with participation from 8VC, Pear VC, Bloomberg Beta, and newer investors including HRT Ventures and Next Ladder Ventures. The company says it uses its own independent evaluation system to assess frontier models released by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and xAI, rather than relying on traditional public benchmark tests. That positioning is central to its business as model developers and enterprise users look for ways to compare performance outside widely used public scoring methods. Vals AI plans to use the new capital to expand its evaluation infrastructure. It also intends to launch a testing tool that creates programming benchmarks based on a company’s GitHub codebase. The funding round gives the startup fresh resources to build out both its testing capacity and its product offering for enterprise-oriented model assessment.