20VC: 70% of Neolabs Will Die | There Will be a $100BN US Open-Source Model | Data is a Trillion $ Market | Governments Cannot Regulate Models: It is Too Late | The Cyber Attacks to Come Will be Insane with Anastasios Angelopoulos @ Arena artwork

20VC: 70% of Neolabs Will Die | There Will be a $100BN US Open-Source Model | Data is a Trillion $ Market | Governments Cannot Regulate Models: It is Too Late | The Cyber Attacks to Come Will be Insane with Anastasios Angelopoulos @ Arena

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

August 3, 2026

Anastasios Angelopoulos is the co-founder and CEO of Arena, the real-world evaluation platform that has become a leading referee of the global AI model race. Arena has raised $250 million, with the latest round valuing the company at $1.7BN.
Speakers: Anastasios Angelopoulos, Harry Stebbings
**Anastasios Angelopoulos** (0:00)
Really, what happened is that Kimi actually beat all American models, including Fable, in some subset of tasks. I believe that we're going to have at least one, you know, multi-hundred billion, if not trillion dollar American company focused on American first open source. Right now, Anthropic has like disgustingly high gross margins in their inference. The idea that we should have a central government body that tells us when it's time to release a new product versus not is crazy to me. This is gonna be so fucking insane. What happens with like the cyber attacks? There's at least 75 NeoWaps. For sure, two thirds of those are gonna be worth nothing. Next round's a bitch. They think about data as a commodity. It's really not. It's actually less so of a commodity than even GPUs. I believe it's gonna be at least $100 billion by 2030, if not a trillion. Silicon Valley investors have become total bitches with respect to revenue concentration. What are you talking about? Like TSMC has revenue concentration.

**Harry Stebbings** (0:56)
This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, Anjani Midher, he's probably one of the smartest dudes in AI. He's a seed investor in Anthropic. And when I asked him, who's the smartest AI mind that you know? And he said, Anastasios Angelopoulos. I got that wrong, but he's Greek and honestly, I'm too old to care at this point, but he's an awesome dude. And I was like, wow, can I have an intro? And he introduced me. And so I had Anastasios on the show. Anastasios is the founder and CEO of Arena, formerly LM Arena. It allows you to vote on the best models. It's an unbelievable model evaluator. And this turned out to be one of the most fun shows I have done literally in recent memory. He did not give a single shit about upsetting people and was bluntly incredibly articulate, clear, concise, and opinionated on the future of Chinese open source models, whether they should be banned, whether export bans on chips are useful, how we'll see a distribution between frontier and open source models, who really should be the one to evaluate whether a model is vulnerable or not. This and so much more in what was such a fun show with Anastasios. But before we dive into the show today, founders face a different set of challenges at every stage of growth. For Sid Shait, co-founder and CEO of D-Matrix, JP Morgan delivered the guidance and expertise to help navigate what came next. He credits JP Morgan's high touch approach with supporting D-Matrix as it grew and expanded internationally. Whether you're in the early days or expanding into new markets, JP Morgan helps startups navigate complexity with real confidence, offering personalized guidance and deep sector expertise. Find out how JP Morgan helps founders at jpmorgan.com/growwithoutlimits.
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Anastasios, this is going to be a lot of fun for me, because I'm dumb as rocks, and you're going to teach me a whole load of stuff today. So thank you so much for joining me, dude.

**Anastasios Angelopoulos** (3:57)
Oh no, thank you for having me.

**Harry Stebbings** (3:58)
Dude, I told you I used this as a chance to catch up with old friends. So it was wonderful stalking you for the last few days. I just want to start for anyone that doesn't know, can you explain to me very succinctly and easily, what is Arena and why is it important and gaining notoriety today?

**Anastasios Angelopoulos** (4:14)
Well, Arena is the platform for measuring AI performance in the real world. So what that means is that we're not using static benchmarks, we're not using some random data set that somebody collected, but rather what happens when you put AI in the hands of real people. And in so doing, we're measuring the objective reality of how AI affects humanity, whether it's factual, whether it's steerable, whether humans prefer it or dis-prefer it, whether it's hallucinating, whether there's errors, whether people are getting their actual jobs done with AI in reality. And then we're helping labs improve their models, we're helping the ecosystem understand the performance of different AIs and keep track of all the amazing breaking news, all the new models, multiple models being released every week. So that's sort of the story of Arena. We're the central evaluation platform of AI.

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