DesignArena founders raise $7.9M to bring human taste to AI models

The company behind DesignArena, Intelligence, announced on Monday that it has raised $7.9 million in seed funding. Index Ventures led the round, with participation from Conviction, A*, Valkyrie, and other investors.

The project took shape in 2025, when co-founder Grace Li and her college friends were building an AI game engine. Their models could produce functional games, but none of them were fun. That led them to think about how to measure fun and whether human judgment was indispensable. They concluded that authentic feedback at scale was the missing piece and began developing a platform to deliver it.

DesignArena works by showing users two or more outputs and asking them to choose the better option until a final ranking is created. Users can compare websites, images, and other visual formats. While the consumer product is useful, the real market is enterprise clients that need constant feedback for their media-generating models. According to Li, users are not concerned about which AI model they are rating; they simply want the best result, making their choices valuable for model improvement.

The platform is already generating $60 million in annual recurring revenue, establishing itself as a key source of human-led evaluation data. Since every user must log in, the company tracks how preferences vary by region and over time. For example, web dashboards in Asia tend to have a more maximalist design style.

Human evaluation is a complement to automated benchmarks, which can be gamed or manipulated — a vulnerability that surfaced with last week's Hugging Face security breach. However, this market is not guaranteed to be profitable for all players. Yupp, once funded with $33 million and having over 1.3 million users, shut down earlier this year. In contrast, LM Arena, which applies a similar concept to text outputs, raised $150 million in January.