Intelligence, the company behind Design Arena, has raised $7.9 million in seed funding to expand its platform for evaluating AI-generated visual content through human feedback. Index Ventures led the round, with participation from Conviction, A*, Valkyrie and other investors.
Co-founder Grace Li started the company with college friends shortly before graduating in 2025. Their original project was an AI engine that could produce functional video games, but the team found that technical performance did not determine whether people enjoyed the results.
Users Rank AI Outputs Through Direct Comparisons
Design Arena presents users with AI-generated websites, images, games and other visual formats. After entering a prompt and selecting a format and style, users compare anonymous outputs through a series of A-versus-B choices.
The process continues until the user has ranked several results from best to worst. Users generally do not know which models produced each option, helping the company gather feedback based on preference rather than brand recognition.
The service has attracted about 5.3 million users worldwide. Intelligence says the enterprise side of its business now generates approximately $60 million in annual recurring revenue by providing AI companies with human evaluation data.
Human Feedback Helps Labs Measure Design Quality
Participating AI developers can use the rankings to study which outputs people prefer across websites, images and other media. The feedback may help them improve areas that automated benchmarks find difficult to measure, including visual appeal, layout and style.
Users must sign in before receiving their completed output. This allows Intelligence to examine how preferences differ across locations and change over time, with Li noting that users in Asia often favour more maximalist website dashboards.
The company sees human evaluation as a complement to automated benchmarks, which can process more tests but may be manipulated or optimised against. Design Arena focuses on how people respond to outputs during normal product use.
Crowdsourced Evaluation Attracts Investor Interest
The funding round was led by Index Ventures, with Conviction investors Sarah Guo and Mike Vernal also participating. Intelligence plans to expand the formats available through Design Arena and increase the amount of preference data it can supply to AI developers.
Other companies are pursuing similar evaluation models. LM Arena uses anonymous comparisons for text-based AI responses and raised $150 million in January after launching its commercial service.
However, not every consumer evaluation platform has developed a sustainable business. Yupp closed earlier in 2026 after raising $33 million and attracting more than 1.3 million users, despite also working with major AI model developers.
The full funding details and comments from Li were first reported by TechCrunch.
Featured image credits: Magnific.com
For more stories like it, click the +Follow button at the top of this page to follow us.