AI leaderboard provider Arena, which started as a research project at UC Berkeley in 2023, achieved $100 million in annual running revenue just eight months after launching commercially.
Arena is best known for its popular crowdsourced AI model performance leaderboards generated from over 10 million user ratings. The consumer website allows users to enter prompts that are sent to two models. The user then selects which model gave better results.
Arena’s popular AI model leaderboards are available for free to the public, but the company began monetizing its platform last September when it introduced AI Assessments, a service that provides model labs and enterprises with in-depth performance analysis collected from the community.
Arena’s rapid revenue growth shows that its commercial products are popular with its customers as well as its evaluator community, who frequent the platform for early access to the latest, often unreleased AI models.
“A lot of people don’t even understand that our business makes money at all. People still see us as an open source project,” Arena co-founder and CEO Anastasios Angelopoulos told TechCrunch.
While Arena calls its revenue milestones ARR, a term that traditionally refers to annual recurring revenue, Angelopoulos clarified that the company charges customers for “consumption.” This means the revenue is non-recurring.
Arena has no direct competitors, but Yupp, another crowdsourced AI model selection startup, shut down in March. Angelopoulos said the company is competing “for the same dollar” with human labeling startups such as Mercor, Surge and Scale AI. Both of these startups help model makers improve their AI after training.
As AI providers strive to maximize model performance, the desire for post-training improvement services continues to surge. When Arena announced in January that it had raised a $150 million Series A at a post-money valuation of $1.7 billion, it had annual revenue of $30 million.
Elsewhere, Handshake’s total annual revenue from AI training has nearly doubled since January, rising from $550 million to nearly $1 billion, The Information reported in April. Mercor’s annual revenue also surpassed $1 billion earlier this year, up from $500 million last September, according to The Information.
With its recently introduced Agent Mode, Arena ranks models for a variety of tasks such as text, coding, vision, and image generation, as well as complex, long-running workflows.
Along with Angelopoulos, Arena was co-founded by fellow UC Berkeley postdoc Wei-Lin Chiang, who serves as the startup’s CTO. The startup was co-founded by Ion Stoica, a renowned professor at UC Berkeley and co-founder of Databricks, who advised on the project before it was incorporated as a company in April 2025.
Arena has raised a total of $250 million from investors including Felicis, Andreessen Horowitz, The House Fund, LDVP, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Laude Ventures, and UC Investments.
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