AI Design Evaluation Startup Intelligence Raises $7.9M Seed Round for Design Arena Platform

Intelligence, the company behind AI evaluation tool Design Arena, has raised $7.9 million in a seed round led by Index Ventures, with participation from Conviction, A*, Valkyrie, and others. Co-founder Grace Li said the company began in 2025 when she and college friends building an AI game engine realized their models could generate functional games that weren’t actually fun, prompting them to develop a way to gather human feedback at scale.

That effort became Design Arena, now used by 5.3 million people worldwide. Users submit prompts across formats like websites and images, then rank AI-generated outputs in head-to-head comparisons. While individual users interact with the platform casually, Li said the real value lies on the enterprise side, where AI labs use the aggregated rankings as continuous feedback to improve their models. Because users remain indifferent to which model produced a given output, their preferences offer labs meaningful signal, a service Li said now generates $60 million in annual recurring revenue.

The company also tracks how design preferences shift across regions and over time, positioning human evaluation as a complement to automated benchmarks, which remain vulnerable to manipulation. The human-feedback approach has had mixed success industry-wide, with competitor Yupp shutting down earlier this year despite raising $33 million, while rival platform LM Arena raised $150 million in January.