Vals AI raises $40 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz at $400 million valuation

Vals AI, a platform that tests AI models on real-world professional tasks, has raised a $40 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $400 million valuation, the company said.

The raise lands as enterprises push for independent ways to judge whether AI models actually perform on the specialized work they are bought to do, rather than on generic public leaderboards. Vals AI builds benchmarks around professional tasks in fields such as law, banking, engineering and medicine, and says its evaluations have been cited in model cards from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and xAI.

Growth appears to be behind the interest from Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley firm known as a16z. Revenue has grown eightfold compared with all of 2025, the company said, while its customer base has doubled and its team has tripled over the past six months. Existing backers 8VC and Bloomberg Beta joined the round alongside new investors HRT Ventures and Next Ladder Ventures.

“AI has quickly become a trillion-dollar market without the independent measurement institutions that other markets of this scale, like finance and healthcare, require,” Vals AI said, framing the funding as fuel for expanding those benchmarks.