The frontier AI world runs on benchmarks, and a new lab just got funded to build them. Idler has raised $9.0M in seed funding, backed by Paradigm, Y Combinator, and a roster of angel investors including Manish Chandra and Feross Aboukhadijeh.
The company describes itself as a frontier data research lab, creating the evals and environments that leading AI labs use to measure and train their models. With evaluation standards becoming a competitive battleground in the industry, this round positions Idler to carve out a niche in the infrastructure layer of model testing.
