Design Arena, a platform developed by Intelligence, has secured $7.9 million in seed funding led by Index Ventures with participation from Conviction, A*, Valkyrie, and others. The startup was founded by Grace Li and her college friends just before their 2025 graduation, initially aiming to create an AI game engine. However, they quickly realized that while AI could create functional games, human judgment was essential to evaluate whether those games were enjoyable. This insight led them to build Design Arena, which now serves 5.3 million users globally by providing scalable, human-based feedback to improve AI models.

The platform allows users to rank AI-generated outputs through an interface that supports multiple media formats, including websites and images. Users engage in simple “A vs. B” comparisons to rank options, offering valuable insight into which AI outputs resonate best with human preferences. While the tool is accessible to individual users, its primary value lies in serving enterprise clients—particularly frontier AI labs—that use this immediate and continuous feedback to refine their models. The company currently generates $60 million in annual recurring revenue, demonstrating strong demand for human taste evaluations in AI development.

Design Arena’s approach addresses a significant gap in AI improvements by integrating human tastes, which automated benchmarks often fail to capture or can be manipulated. The platform’s requirement for user logins also enables tracking of shifting preferences across regions and time, revealing, for example, regional differences such as Asia’s preference for more maximalist web design. This human evaluation model is increasingly recognized as essential, especially in light of recent security incidents that exposed vulnerabilities in purely automated benchmarking systems.

Despite the competitive and challenging market for crowdsourced AI feedback, as illustrated by the shutdown of Yupp earlier this year, Design Arena demonstrates promising traction and sustainability. Other companies using a similar human evaluation method, such as LM Arena, have also raised significant capital recently. Design Arena’s success signals growing investor confidence in the importance of blending human judgment with AI to ensure models deliver outputs that truly align with user desires.