Vals raises $40M for private AI benchmarks

Vals raised a $40 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz while reporting revenue eight times higher than last year and headcount growth from 8 to 25. TechCrunch’s profile of the private-evaluation startup says Vals keeps test materials undisclosed and measures real work in law, finance, coding, and frontier-risk domains. Builders should treat public leaderboard gains as leads, not procurement evidence, and budget for contamination-resistant task evaluations—the same test-split problem surfaced in Astra for Law’s benchmark result.