The a16z Show · Wednesday, September 9, 2026
Rayan Krishnan explained that Val's was founded in 2024 to address the insufficiency of existing AI model measurement tools. The company aims to be a third-party evaluator, creating high-quality benchmarks to discern new model capabilities and potentially evolve into a shared language for AI assessment.
“And so what we're doing is forming a set of proxies for every part of the process takes the build the next version of the models.”
“And so we started our first benchmarks in 2024. And now the last couple of years, that has kind of been realized by many different parts of the industry.”
“And so we realized is that there would need to be some third-party company that solely existed to build really high-quality evaluations and benchmarks.”