DesignArena startup raises $7.9M to inject human taste into AI models

The startup now known as Intelligence, which operates the Design Arena platform, has closed a $7.9 million seed round led by Index Ventures. Conviction, A*, Valkyrie and other investors also participated.

The company was founded by a group of college friends, including co-founder Grace Li, who originally set out to build an AI game engine shortly before their 2025 graduation. While the engine could produce functional games, the team concluded that none were fun, leading them to ask how fun could be measured. They decided that human judgment was indispensable and began exploring ways to collect honest feedback at scale.

Design Arena has since grown into a tool used by 5.3 million people globally. For regular users, it functions like a model router: a ChatGPT-style window accepts prompts and lets users choose among formats such as websites, images and a dozen other visual outputs. After submitting a request, users see paired "A vs. B" options and rank results from best to worst.

The real commercial value lies on the enterprise side. Model developers treat the platform as a constant source of feedback for their media-generating systems. Because most users simply want the best output rather than favoring a particular model, their rankings offer insight into what audiences actually prefer. Li said the platform now generates $60 million in annual recurring revenue and has become an important supplier of human-led evaluation data for frontier labs.

Because users must log in to receive outputs, Intelligence can also observe how preferences shift by region and over time. According to Li, web dashboards in Asia tend to lean toward a more maximalist design style.

The approach serves as a complement to automated benchmarks, which can process larger volumes but are vulnerable to manipulation. Last week's Hugging Face breach showed the risks, the company noted. However, not every crowdsourced evaluation business has succeeded. Yupp, which raised $33 million from investors including Chris Dixon, shut down earlier this year despite having more than 1.3 million users and some frontier model clients. Meanwhile, LM Arena, a similar service focused on text responses, raised $150 million in January, only four months after its paid product launched.