Vals, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, is looking to become the gold standard for AI benchmarking

Vals, founded in 2024, raised $40 million in a Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz after a seed round from 8VC and Bloomberg Beta. The company offers non-public benchmarks that test AI models on industry-specific tasks—law, finance, coding, cybersecurity, biosecurity, recursive self-improvement—and assess both positive and negative outcomes. Clients pay for these evaluations, which Vals reports have grown eightfold in revenue.