DesignArena creators raise $7.9 million for taste-driven AI evaluation

DesignArena started as a project among college friends building an AI game engine, but they realized that models could produce functional games that weren't fun, highlighting the need for human judgment at scale. This led to creating DesignArena, a platform where users rank outputs of media-generating AI models through A/B choices, and it's now used by 5.3 million people. The company behind it, Intelligence, closed a $7.9 million seed round led by Index Ventures with participation from Conviction, A*, Valkyrie and others. For enterprises, DesignArena provides a source of endless instant feedback, with frontier labs paying for it; the site is currently generating $60 million in ARR. Users must log in to get outputs, allowing Intelligence to track taste changes across continents and over time, complementing automated benchmarks which can be easily gamed. However, not all human-evaluation startups succeed; Yupp shut down earlier this year despite raising $33 million, while LM Arena, which evaluates text responses similarly, raised $150 million in a Series A in January.