Key facts
- Intelligence, the company behind the AI feedback tool DesignArena, announced a $7.9 million seed funding round.
- The funding round was led by Index Ventures with participation from Conviction, A*, Valkyrie, and others.
- DesignArena uses human judgment to provide feedback on AI model outputs, particularly for media-generating models.
- The platform is used by 5.3 million people globally and generates $60 million in ARR.
- Intelligence can track how user tastes evolve geographically and over time, complementing automated benchmarks.
Intelligence, the company behind the AI feedback platform DesignArena, has raised $7.9 million in a seed funding round led by Index Ventures. The company aims to bring human judgment to AI models, addressing a critical bottleneck in the development of AI-generated content.
Founded by college friends in 2025, DesignArena allows users to rank AI outputs through a series of "A vs. B" choices. This crowdsourced feedback is valuable for AI companies seeking to improve their models' design and user appeal. The platform currently serves 5.3 million users worldwide and generates $60 million in annual recurring revenue.
Intelligence's platform offers a Chat-GPT-style interface for prompts and supports various visual formats. For enterprise clients, it acts as a continuous feedback loop for media-generating models. The company also tracks user preferences across different regions, providing insights that complement automated evaluation methods, which can be susceptible to manipulation.
Despite the success of DesignArena, the market for human evaluation platforms has seen both thriving startups and failures, such as Yupp, which recently closed after raising $33 million. However, LM Arena, a similar text-based response platform, recently raised $150 million.