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Intelligence

What’s the limit?

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

Intelligence is the company behind Design Arena, a public leaderboard where real users compare outputs from frontier AI models on subjective creative work like websites, images, audio, and video. Design Arena is the world's first benchmark for AI design, powered by the votes of over 2,000,000 users in 190+ countries. Users are randomly assigned the top AI models for subjective tasks like website, image, audio and video generation, producing Elo rankings that frontier labs use as human-preference signal. The audience is model developers, applied AI teams, and operators who need grounded evidence of which model actually produces work people prefer, rather than scores on academic benchmarks. The launch reframes the parent company as Intelligence and coincides with a seed round. The company behind DesignArena, dubbed 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. Intelligence is positioning Design Arena as the first of several evaluation products, alongside work on real-world full-stack web application benchmarking that tests whether AI coding agents can autonomously build production-grade apps with persistent databases, and PredictionBench for forecasting evaluation. The team is small and technical. Grace Li is Co-Founder and CEO and Kamryn Ohly is Co-Founder and CTO , with a founding group that started a few weeks before graduation in 2025, with a handful of college friends trying to make their AI game engine work before pivoting into evaluation infrastructure after finding that subjective quality was the harder problem to measure. This launch matters right now because frontier labs are hitting a ceiling on verifiable benchmarks in creative domains, and Design Arena's live voting data has become one of the few external signals that ranks image, video, and frontend models on what users actually pick.
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B2C<500KSeedCinematicExplainerGlobalUSVertical AIFunding announcement
Comments (9)
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Priya Vatsan9d ago

team of 10 pushing 5.5M users is the actual flex here, the ARR bit is just dessert. curious what the on-call rotation looks like because someone is definitely not sleeping.

Brian Otieno9d ago

ok wait, six months from 5 to 60 with ten people means the growth loop is doing something feral. what's the actual acquisition channel, I refuse to believe it's just twitter.

Kostya B.9d ago

the tweet buries the lede under the fundraise line. lead with DesignArena, the number nerds will scroll for it anyway.

Diego Fonseca9d ago

one more thing: let users vote head-to-head on the model outputs and expose an ELO leaderboard per design vertical. you're 80% there already, just ship the scoreboard.

Hoang N.9d ago

so is this Figma but the models fight each other? asking because I still open Sketch on tuesdays.

Ramona Iliescu9d ago

every one of these arena products looks incredible in a 30 second clip and then falls apart the moment you ask for a second revision. would love a raw unedited session.

Gavriil P.9d ago

before my design org can touch this: SSO, audit logs, data residency, and please tell me the training opt-out is a real toggle and not a support ticket.

sohrab9d ago

the launch video pacing is clean but that voiceover sounds suspiciously like an eleven labs preset. bonus points if the AI company narrated its own AI reveal with AI.

Chidinma Eze9d ago

building in the eval space too and this launch is annoyingly well executed. congrats, now I have to redo my landing page this weekend.