Intelligence

cofounder @intelligence_ai (@designarena, @predictionbench). Prev cs + neuro harvard, swe apple

Intelligence is the company behind DesignArena, an evaluation platform that collects human preference data on AI-generated visual outputs and sells that signal to frontier labs training design-capable models. For non-enterprise users, DesignArena works like a sophisticated model router with a ChatGPT-style prompt window and dropdowns for websites, images, and a dozen other visual formats. Once a request is submitted, the user is presented with a series of "A vs. B" choices until they've ranked the outputs from best to worst. The real value comes from the enterprise side, where participating models treat it as a source of instant feedback, and rankings surface what users actually want in media-generating models. The launch matters now because human evaluation is becoming a bottleneck for generative AI progress in subjective domains like design, where automated benchmarks struggle. Intelligence tracks logged-in users so it can also observe how taste changes across continents and over time, offering a complement to automated benchmarks that can operate at greater scale but are often gamed. The company is also expanding beyond design, with sister product PredictionBench signaling a broader push into human-in-the-loop evals for tasks where quality is subjective and hard to verify. The team is led by cofounder and CEO Grace Li (previously CS and neuroscience at Harvard, SWE at Apple) and cofounder and CTO Kamryn Ohly. Li has said the company started a few weeks before graduation in 2025, when a handful of college friends were trying to make an AI game engine work and realized none of the generated games were fun, which raised the question of how to tell whether a game would be fun in the first place. Intelligence announced a $7.9 million seed round led by Index Ventures with participation from Conviction (Sarah Guo and Mike Vernal), A*, Valkyrie, and others.

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