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Intelligence

Category: AI Infrastructure

Creator of Design Arena, the world's largest crowdsourced benchmark for AI-generated design, providing human preference data to frontier AI labs. Intelligence was founded in 2025. The company is led by Grace Li. Based in San Francisco, USA. Team size: 11-50. Total funding raised: $7.9M. Latest round: Seed. Key investors include Index Ventures, Conviction, A*, Valkyrie, Y Combinator.

Founded
2025
Headquarters
San Francisco, USA
Team size
11-50
Total funding
$7.9M

Value proposition

Provides scalable human preference data for frontier AI labs by crowdsourcing A/B comparisons of AI-generated designs from millions of users, enabling models to improve on subjective qualities like taste, usability, and aesthetics.

Products and solutions

Design Arena (flagship — crowdsourced AI design benchmark), Prediction Arena (AI model prediction/uncertainty evaluation), Social Arena (AI content influence evaluation), Audio Arena (AI conversation evaluation), MicroEvals (individual evaluations of agent-generated code)

Unique value

World's first and largest crowdsourced benchmark for AI-generated design, capturing human taste and visual preference at scale — a critical complement to automated benchmarks that can be gamed or manipulated.

Target customer

Frontier AI labs and model developers seeking human preference data for training and evaluating generative models; also free consumer-facing model comparison tool for 5.3M+ users.

Industries served

AI/ML model development, Generative AI, Design, Creative tools

Technology advantage

Crowdsourced human preference data at massive scale (5.3M+ users, 190+ countries) using Bradley-Terry (Elo) rating system; tracks taste changes across continents and over time; $60M ARR at seed stage with 10-person team; YC S25 backed.

How they differentiate

Focuses specifically on design/aesthetic evaluation (websites, images, video, audio) rather than general text responses; uses live organic users rather than synthetic benchmarks; tracks geographic taste differences; monetizes via enterprise data sales to frontier labs.

Main competitors

LM Arena, Yupp (defunct)

Key partnerships

Y Combinator (S25 batch), Partnerships with frontier AI labs (unnamed) for human preference data

Notable customers

Frontier AI labs (unnamed), 5.3M+ global users across 190+ countries

Major milestones

Founded 2025 by Harvard grads, YC Summer 2025 batch, launched Design Arena, scaled from $5M to $60M ARR in 6 months, reached 5.3M+ users, raised $7.9M seed led by Index Ventures (Aug 2026)

Growth metrics

$60M ARR; 5.3M+ users across 190+ countries; 10-person team

Market positioning

Positioned as the leading source of human-led evaluation data for AI design, competing with LM Arena (text-based, raised $150M Series A) and Yupp (defunct). Claims $60M ARR at seed stage.

Geographic focus

Global (190+ countries); primarily US-based

About Grace Li

Ex-Apple Software Engineer; Harvard University CS & Neuroscience. Co-founded Intelligence after graduating from Harvard in 2025.

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