Vals AI, Inc.
Vals AI provides independent, standardized benchmarks for evaluating large language models and AI applications on real-world enterprise tasks. The company aims to bridge the gap between theoretical AI advancements and practical business applications by offering transparent, unbiased evaluations across industries like legal, finance, healthcare, and coding.
Founding Story
Founded in 2023 by Rayan Krishnan and Langston Nashold, who both dropped out of their AI-focused master's program at Stanford University to pursue their vision. Following ChatGPT's release, they recognized a critical gap in the tech industry: the lack of an independent, standardized test to evaluate AI services. They saw the need for a neutral, third-party review system for large language models, addressing issues like data contamination in existing benchmarks and the need for industry-specific evaluation rather than generic tests.
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Leadership
Founders
Rayan Krishnan
Co-Founder & CEO. 24 years old (as of 2025), abandoned Ph.D. plans to start Vals AI after ChatGPT's release. Previous experience at Palantir, Microsoft, University of Washington, and SAP Concur. Based at Stanford University.
Langston Nashold
Co-Founder & CTO. Dropped out of AI-focused master's program at Stanford to pursue Vals AI. Stanford CS, Andrew Ng's AI + Climate Change Lab, previously worked at Hudson River Trading.
Executive Team
Rayan Krishnan
Co-Founder & CEO
24 years old, former experience at Palantir, Microsoft, University of Washington, and SAP Concur
Langston Nashold
Co-Founder & CTO
Stanford CS, Andrew Ng's AI + Climate Change Lab, previously at Hudson River Trading
Business Model
Revenue Model
Enterprise subscriptions and API access for evaluation platform. Provides both public free benchmarks and paid enterprise platform for companies to run custom evaluations. Revenue from AI labs, model developers, enterprise customers, and legal/financial firms needing evaluation services.
Target Markets
- Legal firms and legal service providers
- Financial services and banking institutions
- Healthcare organizations
- AI labs and model developers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc.)
- Enterprise software companies building AI applications
- Legal technology vendors
- Evaluating LLM suitability for enterprise applications before deployment
- Benchmarking AI models on legal research, case analysis, and contract review
- Testing AI performance on financial analysis and Excel-based tasks
- Measuring accuracy of AI in healthcare and medical applications
- Auditing LLM applications to replace manual review teams
- Model selection and purchasing decisions for enterprises
- Anthropic
- OpenAI
- Everlaw
History & Milestones
Published first Legal AI Benchmark Study (VLAIR)
Released report showing Gen AI tools outperforming lawyers on legal research tasks
Featured in The Atlantic article on young AI billionaires
Successful small preview launch of evaluation platform
Official public launch featured in Bloomberg
