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. Design Arena is used by 5.3 million people worldwide, and co-founder Grace Li said the service now generates $60 million in annual recurring revenue.
The company traces its origin to 2025, when Li and college friends building an AI game engine found their models could produce functional games that were not actually fun. That insight prompted them to develop a way to gather human feedback at scale, an effort that became Design Arena.
Design Arena’s model and enterprise value
Users submit prompts across formats such as websites and images and rank AI-generated outputs in head-to-head comparisons. While individual users often interact with the platform casually, Li said the greater value is on the enterprise side: 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 provide labs a meaningful signal, according to Li.
The company also tracks how design preferences shift across regions and over time, positioning human evaluation as a complement to automated benchmarks, which Intelligence says remain vulnerable to manipulation.
Industry context and competitors
Human-feedback approaches have had mixed success across the industry. Competitor Yupp shut down earlier this year despite raising $33 million, while rival platform LM Arena raised $150 million in January. The new funding will support Intelligence as it continues to scale Design Arena and its feedback services for AI labs.
