Design Arena Creator Intelligence Secures $7.9 Million to Scale Human Evaluation for AI

Intelligence, the company behind the popular AI platform Design Arena, has raised $7.9 million in seed funding to expand its human-led evaluation network for artificial intelligence models. The round was led by Index Ventures, with participation from Conviction, A*, Valkyrie, and other investors. By converting user comparisons into actionable evaluation data, the platform has grown to serve 5.3 million users globally while reaching $60 million in annual recurring revenue.

What Happened

Co-founded by Grace Li and a group of college friends shortly before graduation in 2025, the company originally began as an attempt to develop an AI game engine. While the models produced functional games, the team realized the output lacked entertainment value, highlighting a fundamental need for human judgment to assess quality. To solve this, the founders created Design Arena to gather human feedback at scale.

The platform rapidly found traction with AI developers and frontier labs seeking scalable feedback to refine media-generating models. Intelligence secured its first enterprise contract with a frontier lab about a week after launch, addressing what Li described as a key bottleneck in AI design development.

The newly announced $7.9 million seed funding round was led by Index Ventures, alongside Conviction (Sarah Guo and Mike Vernal), A*, Valkyrie, and others. The company reports that Design Arena currently reaches 5.3 million users and generates $60 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR).

Key Highlights

• Seed Funding: Intelligence raised $7.9 million in seed funding led by Index Ventures, with participation from Conviction, A*, Valkyrie, and other investors.
• Platform Performance: Design Arena is used by 5.3 million people worldwide and reports $60 million in ARR.
• User Interface: For general users, the platform acts like a model router featuring a prompt window alongside visual dropdown menus for websites, images, and over a dozen other visual formats.
• Ranking Format: Users evaluate visual outputs through direct “A vs. B” choices, ranking generated options from best to worst.
• Regional Trends: Because users must log in to receive output, Intelligence tracks how aesthetic preferences change across regions and time, noting for example that web dashboards in Asia tend toward a more maximalist style.

Why This Matters

Crowdsourced human evaluation provides a critical complement to automated AI benchmarks. While automated benchmarks scale easily, they remain susceptible to being gamed or manipulated, a challenge underscored by the recent Hugging Face security breach. Intelligence offers continuous, direct user feedback that reveals genuine human preference to frontier labs building visual models.

The announcement highlights varying dynamics across the human evaluation sector. While text-focused benchmark platform LM Arena raised $150 million in Series A funding in January four months after introducing its paid product, competitor Yupp closed down earlier this year despite securing $33 million from a16z crypto’s Chris Dixon and reaching over 1.3 million users. Intelligence’s reported $60 million ARR signals strong current enterprise demand for visual design evaluation data.

What to Watch Next

With its fresh capital, Intelligence plans to continue supplying human-driven evaluation data to frontier labs working on media generation. Industry analysts will watch whether the company can maintain its current growth trajectory and user engagement while building a sustainable enterprise business in the evolving AI evaluation market.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Design Arena?

Design Arena is an AI tool and evaluation platform created by Intelligence. It allows users to input prompts across various visual formats and rank outputs through side-by-side comparisons, generating preference data for AI developers.

Who funded Intelligence’s recent seed round?

The $7.9 million seed round was led by Index Ventures, with participation from Conviction (Sarah Guo and Mike Vernal), A*, Valkyrie, and additional investors.

How does Design Arena collect human taste data?

Users log in to prompt the platform across visual formats like websites and images, then complete “A vs. B” direct rankings. Intelligence tracks these choices to identify evolving design tastes across different global regions.

Source: Based on reporting from TechCrunch.