DesignArena secures $7.9 million seed funding to scale human feedback for AI

DesignArena's parent company Intelligence raised a $7.9 million seed round led by Index Ventures, aiming to expand its human-in-the-loop evaluation platform for AI models.

Grace Li and a group of university friends launched DesignArena in early 2025 to address the lack of enjoyable AI-generated games, eventually turning the tool into a broader human-feedback platform for AI outputs. The service presents users with paired comparisons across various media formats, collecting preferences that feed back into model training. With a user base of 5.3 million and an estimated $60 million in annual recurring revenue, the platform has become a key source of evaluation data for frontier AI labs.

On Monday, Intelligence, the company behind DesignArena, announced a $7.9 million seed round headed by Index Ventures, with participation from Conviction, A*, Valkyrie and other investors. The funding will support scaling of the platform, including enhanced tracking of taste trends across regions such as Asia. While other human-evaluation startups like Yupp have struggled, peers such as LM Arena recently raised $150 million, highlighting the sector’s rapid growth.