Vals AI raises $40M for real-world model tests

Vals AI raised a $40 million Series A at a $400 million valuation, while reporting 8× revenue growth versus 2025 and a doubled customer base. In Vals’s funding announcement, the evaluator says its private, work-like benchmarks are already cited in model cards from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and xAI; a16z’s account says results can turn around within hours of model access. For teams still choosing models from public leaderboards, the agent-evaluation governance case is the practical companion: benchmark the workflow and its controls, not just the model’s exam score.