Vals AI

AI Evaluation · Enterprise AI · AI Infrastructure

Funding

Vals AI raises $40M Series A at $400M valuation led by a16z

Its own benchmark shows top AI models still fail roughly half of real financial-analyst tasks, the gap a16z is betting on closing.

• Vals AI closed a $40 million Series A at a $400 million valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz, with existing investors 8VC, Pear VC, and Bloomberg Beta returning alongside new backers HRT Ventures and Next Ladder Ventures.
• Vals AI positions itself as an independent evaluator of artificial intelligence, building benchmarks that test models on real professional work in law, finance, engineering, and medicine rather than academic exams.
• The company says revenue has grown eightfold versus all of 2025, its customer base has doubled, and its team has tripled over the past six months.
• Alongside the raise, Vals launched Vals Smith for building custom coding benchmarks from GitHub repos, new frontier-risk benchmarks covering cybersecurity and mental-health harms, and a rebuilt Vals Index 2.0.
• A February 2026 ETH Zurich/Stanford preprint found 29 of 60 widely used LLM benchmarks had saturated, meaning top models became statistically indistinguishable on them — the exact gap Vals says it fills.
• As AI shifts from answering questions to autonomously executing multi-day work, independent evaluation becomes the trust layer labs, enterprises, and regulators need before betting real money on a model.