FundraiseAug 13, 2026, 17:00 UTC

vals.ai raises $40M Series A at $400M valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz

What's the deal? vals.ai has raised $40 million in a Series A round at a $400 million valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). The company says the round includes existing investors 8VC and Bloomberg Beta, alongside new investors HRT Ventures and NextLadder Ventures.

What it does. vals.ai positions itself as an independent evaluator of artificial intelligence. It builds benchmarks for models performing professional work in areas including law, finance, engineering and medicine, using domain-specific tasks and automated scoring rather than relying only on public academic tests.

Why now. The company argues that widely used benchmarks are becoming less useful as models saturate public tests and those tests can leak into training data. Its private test sets are designed to preserve the integrity of the results and help enterprises compare models before deploying them.

Traction. vals.ai says its results have been cited in model cards from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and xAI. It reports that revenue grew eightfold compared with all of 2025, its customer base doubled, and its team tripled in six months.

What's next. Alongside the funding, the company announced Vals Smith, a tool for creating coding benchmarks from GitHub repositories; new frontier-risk benchmarks covering areas including cybersecurity and mental health; and Vals Index 2.0, with broader coverage of the economy.

Image credit: vals.ai