ARC Prize Foundation
ARC Prize Foundation is a YC Winter 2026 (W26) company. Based in San Francisco, CA, USA; Remote. Team of 4.
About ARC Prize Foundation
Summary
ARC Prize Foundation builds open-source AI benchmarks that measure progress toward artificial general intelligence, serving researchers, AI labs, and regulators who need rigorous tools to evaluate whether AI systems can match human learning efficiency. Its ARC-AGI benchmark series exposes the gap between tasks that are trivial for humans and hard for current AI, giving the field a shared standard for tracking genuine intelligence rather than narrow capability. The foundation also runs global competitions and awards research grants to keep AGI progress open and accessible.
Business model
Donation-funded nonprofit; competitions offer prize pools funded through those donations and partners.
Go-to-market
AI labs, academic researchers, and standards bodies adopt the benchmarks directly; participation is open via public leaderboards and annual prize competitions that draw entrants worldwide.
From the Y Combinator listing
AI benchmarks that measure general intelligence and inspire new ideas
ARC Prize builds AI benchmarks that measure general intelligence. Our benchmark, ARC-AGI, has been used by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and xAI. Founded by Mike Knoop and Francois Chollet, we inspire open source artificial general intelligence (AGI) research through benchmarks (the ARC-AGI series), global competitions, research grants, community, and content, we exist to guide researchers, industry, and regulators on the path to AGI. We believe that AGI requires more than just scaling up existing AI models. It demands a fundamental shift towards systems capable of genuine fluid intelligence, the ability to adapt to novel challenges and solve problems efficiently, much like humans do.
Facts
- Industrials / Industrials
- San Francisco, CA, USA; Remote
- 4
- Active
- Early
Founders (1)
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