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UPDATED 2026.06.07
rl-list.com · Vendors · Vals AI
#15

Vals AI

Commercial
medium confidence
www.vals.ai ↗ · Status: active confirmed · Founded 2023

Vals AI is an independent, third-party benchmarking and evaluation platform that scores LLMs and AI applications (copilots, RAG, agents) on rigorous, domain-specific tasks in regulated fields such as legal, finance, healthcare, tax and coding. It publishes public leaderboards (e.g., the Vals Index, Finance Agent benchmark, Vals Legal AI Report) and sells private evaluation infrastructure to labs and enterprise engineering teams.

Key facts
Headquarters
San Francisco, USAreported cite
Headcount band
11-50reported cite
Total raised
unknown cite
Last round
unknown
SOC 2
claimedreported cite
What they sell
evalsconfirmed cite
Open source
yes (benchmark code/datasets published, e.g., Finance Agent benchmark; platform itself is proprietary SaaS)confirmed cite
Deployment
managed-hosted (SaaS) with API/SDK/CLI; web app at platform.vals.aiconfirmed cite

Scale & velocity

Current headcount
~12 people (getLatka, 2025); LinkedIn lists 11-50 employees / ~19 associated profilesreported cite
Headcount growth
unknown
Open roles
unknown
Other locations
unknown
Distributed / remote
unknown

Research depth

Has researchers
yesreported
Researcher count
unknown
Backgrounds
Co-founder/CEO Rayan Krishnan - ex-Stanford AI master's, Co-founder/CTO Langston Nashold - ex-Stanford AI master's, Founding engineer Rez (Reza) Havaei, Collaborations with Stanford researchers and domain experts in law, finance, accountingreported cite
Papers / benchmarks
Finance Agent Benchmark: Benchmarking LLMs on Real-world Financial Research Tasks - arXiv:2508.00828, Vals Legal AI Report (VLAIR), Feb 2025 - https://www.vals.ai, Vals Index / domain leaderboards (TaxEval, CorpFin, MedCode, LegalBench, CaseLaw, ContractLaw, Finance Agent) - https://www.vals.ai, Finance Agent benchmark dataset on Hugging Face - https://huggingface.co/datasets/vals-ai/finance_agent_benchmarkconfirmed cite

Capital

Total raised
unknown cite
Last round
unknown
Investors
unknown
Valuation
unknown cite
Revenue signals
~$1.3M revenue/ARR in 2025 (getLatka self-reported/estimated figure; not vendor-confirmed)reported cite

Security & compliance

SOC 2
claimed-unverified (SOC 2 badge displayed on product page; type not specified; no trust/audit-registry confirmation)reported cite
Other certifications
GDPR (compliance badge displayed on product page; unverified)reported cite
Security page
unknown (no dedicated /security or /trust page found; only SOC 2 and GDPR badges on product page) cite

Product

What they sell
evalsconfirmed cite
Open source
yes (benchmark code/datasets published, e.g., Finance Agent benchmark; platform itself is proprietary SaaS)confirmed cite
License
MIT (finance-agent benchmark repo)confirmed cite
Deployment model
managed-hosted (SaaS) with API/SDK/CLI; web app at platform.vals.aiconfirmed cite
Maturity
GA (public benchmarks/leaderboards live; private evaluation infrastructure offered, partly early access)reported cite
Notable customers
Reed Smith (law firm; VLAIR benchmarking consortium partner, not a paying customer) self-claimed Fisher Phillips (law firm; VLAIR benchmarking consortium partner, not a paying customer) self-claimed McDermott Will & Emery (law firm; VLAIR benchmarking consortium partner, not a paying customer) self-claimed Ogletree Deakins (law firm; VLAIR benchmarking consortium partner, not a paying customer) self-claimed Harvey (legal AI vendor evaluated in VLAIR; not a stated customer) self-claimed CoCounsel/Thomson Reuters (legal AI vendor evaluated in VLAIR; not a stated customer) self-claimed Alexi (legal AI vendor evaluated in VLAIR; not a stated customer) self-claimed cite

Buyer analysis

Best fit: Buyers who need neutral, domain-specific (legal/finance/healthcare) benchmarking and ongoing evaluation of LLM applications on their own data and tasks.

How we verified this

Re-verified the highest-risk claims for Vals AI (vals-ai). Confirmed this is the correct company matching the directory note 'domain benchmarks for regulated work', an independent third-party LLM/AI-application benchmarking platform for legal, finance, healthcare and tax (VLAIR, Vals Index, Finance Agent benchmark arXiv:2508.00828). Biggest correction: the draft's funding profile (total_raised $5M, Seed July 2024, investors Sequoia/Bloomberg Beta/Pear/8VC/J12) appears to be aggregator data conflated with an unrelated company, Vallor (a Miami procurement-AI startup that raised a $4M Bloomberg Beta/Dynamo-led seed in April 2025). getLatka, the most company-specific source, states Vals AI is bootstrapped with $0 raised. I downgraded total_raised, last_round, valuation, and notable_investors to unknown. Notable customers were all marked 'verified' in the draft, but third-party press shows they are VLAIR benchmarking-study consortium partners (law firms) and evaluated vendors (Harvey, CoCounsel, Alexi), not confirmed paying customers, changed all to 'self-claimed'. Removed 'coding environments' from focus_areas (Vals does coding benchmarks, not dev environments). SOC 2 and GDPR remain claimed-unverified (badges only on product page; no trust page). Founded year kept at 2023 (reported) with the 2024 conflict noted. Headcount ~12 / 11-50 band kept as reported. Overall confidence: medium.

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Sources

  1. www.vals.ai/home · 2026-06-07, Official homepage: product, Vals Index, domain leaderboards (finance/legal/healthcare/coding/math)
  2. www.vals.ai/about · 2026-06-07, About page: positioned as independent third-party evaluator; no named team/year/location on page
  3. www.vals.ai/product · 2026-06-07, Product page: SaaS platform.vals.ai, SDK/CLI, CI/CD, SOC 2 + GDPR badges, sensitive-domain focus
  4. www.linkedin.com/company/vals-ai · 2026-06-07, Public snippet: 11-50 employees (~19 profiles), San Francisco, Software Development
  5. www.crunchbase.com/organization/vals-ai · 2026-06-07, Funding profile (403 on direct fetch; details via search snippet): $5M seed, July 2024
  6. tracxn.com/d/companies/vals-ai/__Aeq7C2n56rLfgsWjTrbrPIwiOteKWlKhIWYPbap · 2026-06-07, Founders, investors, founding year
  7. getlatka.com/companies/vals.ai/funding · 2026-06-07, Reported $1.3M revenue, 12-person team in 2025 (self-reported/estimated, unverified)
  8. qa-financial.com/industry-on-a-mission-the-long-road-to-uniform-ai-testi · 2026-06-07, Founders left Stanford AI master's; founding engineer Rez Havaei; mission detail
  9. www.techtimes.com/articles/303524/20240412/standardized-ai-performance-t · 2026-06-07, Founder backgrounds, early benchmark coverage (Apr 2024)
  10. www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-04-11/this-startup-is-trying-to- · 2026-06-07, Bloomberg coverage of company (paywalled; headline only)
  11. www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/vals-ai-evaluates-large-language-models-on · 2026-06-07, Third-party coverage of legal/finance/tax benchmarks
  12. www.lawnext.com/2025/05/vals-ai-issues-open-call-for-vendors-to-particip · 2026-06-07, Law firm consortium partners (Reed Smith, Fisher Phillips, McDermott Will & Emery, Ogletree Deakins); VLAIR vendors Harvey, CoCounsel; project lead Tara Waters; Legaltech Hub partnership
  13. finance.yahoo.com/news/vals-legal-ai-report-establishes-160000601.html · 2026-06-07, Alexi as legal AI vendor in VLAIR
  14. arxiv.org/abs/2508.00828 · 2026-06-07, Finance Agent Benchmark paper; authors Bigeard, Nashold, Krishnan, Wu; 537 expert-authored questions
  15. huggingface.co/datasets/vals-ai/finance_agent_benchmark · 2026-06-07, Finance Agent benchmark dataset
  16. github.com/vals-ai/finance-agent · 2026-06-07, Benchmark repo: MIT license, 141 stars, Python
  17. www.legaltechnologyhub.com/vendors/vals-ai/ · 2026-06-07, Legaltech Hub vendor listing / VLAIR partnership
Last updated 2026-06-07 · Every quantitative field carries a source and a confidence tag. Fields we could not source publicly are marked unknown, never estimated. See the methodology.