Taste Labs

CEO @ Taste Labs | on a mission to end AI slop @taste_ai_ | prev founding team @ExaAILabs

Taste Labs is building a data and infrastructure layer aimed at the parts of AI output that are hard to score with a unit test, things like whether a generated design feels on-brand, original, or visually right. The company is launching out of stealth with an $18.5M seed round co-led by CRV and Amplify Partners, targeting the flood of generic outputs often called slop by supplying preference datasets, rubrics, and evaluation environments to frontier labs and design-focused applications rather than broad consumer tools . The intended buyers are frontier model teams that need post-training data and RL environments for subjective tasks, plus generative AI and agent companies that need context and verification tools so their outputs land closer to what a human would actually ship. The team is starting with design as the first vertical, using it as a concrete test bed for codifying and searching over what "great" means when there is no single correct answer. That focus matters now because the wave of agentic and generative products hitting market is exposing how thin current evals are for taste-sensitive work, and incumbents in MLOps and evaluation are largely built around objective benchmarks rather than aesthetic judgment. Taste Labs is led by founder and CEO Thais Castello Branco, who was previously on the founding team at Exa, and the company is based in San Francisco and hiring across research, engineering, and product.

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