Just eight months after launching its commercial service, AI leaderboard provider Arena, which originated as a research project at UC Berkeley in 2023, has reached $100 million in annualized run-rate revenue.

Arena is best known for its popular crowdsourced AI model performance leaderboard, generated from over 10 million user evaluations. Its consumer website lets a user type a prompt it sends to two models; afterwards, the user chooses which model did a better job.

While Arena’s popular AI model leaderboard is free for public use, the company began generating revenue from its platform in September when it introduced AI Evaluations, a service that provides model labs and enterprises with deep-dive performance analytics gathered from its community.

Arena’s rapid revenue growth shows that its commercial offerings are as popular with customers as they are with its community of evaluators, who are frequently drawn to the platform for early access to the latest, often unreleased, AI models.

“A lot of people don’t even understand that our business is making any money at all; people still see us as like an open-source project,” Anastasios Angelopoulos, Arena’s co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch.

While Arena calls its revenue milestone ARR, a term that traditionally stood for annualized recurring revenue, Angelopoulos clarified that the company charges customers for “consumption,” which means that its revenue is not recurring.