[State of Evals] LMArena's $100M Vision — Anastasios Angelopoulos, LMArena

Alright. We're here with Anastasios from Arena. I actually don't actually know your stars of an a, it's like very Angelopoulos. Yeah. Very good. There you go. Congrats on all the success. You got the Arena handle. Yeah. We did. We got the Arena handle. Thank you. Big branding moment. I mean, I I think x is, like, being more commercial, so obviously you bought it. But, like, at at least you, like, have a place to go to where you can be, like, hey, like, we really like this. But I do think, like, dropping l m Yeah. Has changed the the the the the feel of it. I don't understand how you feel. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, the reason we kept the l m at the beginning is because we were, like we started as LMSIS. Right? Out of the LMSIS sort of, you know, conglomerate at Berkeley. So we decided those language models. Yeah. Exactly. So So we wanted to maybe broaden a little bit. Yeah. And and we were the first arena, so we feel like let's kinda try to own that. Yeah. Last time you we had you guys on, you hadn't really spun out yet. And we I did a call with Alessio, and I was like, these guys are gonna start a company. And I didn't know I think you actually were already started at the time. I don't I don't remember. Maybe. Because Anj I had a I I chatted with Anj. Mhmm. And he said he was your founding CEO. He was indeed. Which, like, people don't know. Yeah. The the Anj Anj is a very interesting character. We we have a podcast schedule with him. Yeah. Yeah. He does a lot more than normal VCs. He does. He's been incredible to us. You you wanna shout out some stuff that you did? Yeah. Absolutely. So, you know, the way the company started was as an incubation by Ansh. Yeah. So what he did is he kinda, like, found us at Berkeley and picked us out of the basement and and was like, hey. These guys seem like they're onto something and started working with us really early. Gave, you know, gave us some grants. He was not you know, a 16 was not the only one to do this. We also had a great grant from Sequoia, but, Anz was, in particular, quite quite supportive of us and, you know, gave us some resources in order to continue building out arena before we even were committed to to starting a business. And in that capacity, he sorta, like, you know, formed an entity for us and this and that. And, you know, he was like, hey. You guys can walk away at any time if you guys don't wanna start a business. I mean, it was really incredible. Very aggressive investment move by him. Right? Because, of course, any money that he spent business. Yeah. At the end …