Five million people rank AI designs so machines can learn what looks good

Key points

• Intelligence, the company behind DesignArena, closed a $7.9 million seed round led by Index Ventures in 2025.
• DesignArena has 5.3 million registered users worldwide who vote on AI-generated visual outputs.
• The platform is generating $60 million in annualised recurring revenue from AI companies that buy the feedback data.
• Rival platform Yupp shut down earlier in 2025 after raising $33 million, showing this market is not guaranteed.
• LM Arena, a similar platform focused on text rather than visuals, raised $150 million in a Series A in January 2025.

Co-founder Grace Li and her college friends built an AI game engine in 2025. The models could produce working games. None of them were any fun to play.

That single problem pointed toward a bigger one: automated tests can measure whether a game runs correctly, but they cannot tell you whether anyone will enjoy it. The team concluded that only real humans could answer that question at scale.

The tool they built to solve it became DesignArena. Using it feels a lot like asking a friend to pick between two logos. A user types a request, chooses a format such as a website layout or a marketing image, and is then shown a series of side-by-side pairs and asked to pick the better one. The platform collects those votes, ranks the outputs, and delivers the winner.

So who is actually paying for this?

The paying customers are the AI laboratories that build image and video generators. Those labs need to know whether their models produce output that real people find attractive and useful, and automated scoring tools often miss the point.

"It was the missing bottleneck for a lot of these models to make improvements in the design space," Li says. "About a week later, we closed our first major deal with a frontier lab, and the rest is kind of history."

Because users must log in to retrieve their results, Intelligence can also track how preferences shift across regions and over time. Li notes, for instance, that web dashboards in Asia tend to favour a more detailed, information-dense visual style than those in Western markets. That kind of nuance is exactly what automated benchmarks, which test AI models against fixed question sets, struggle to capture. Benchmarks can also be "gamed", meaning developers can quietly tune their models to score well on the test without actually improving the product.

The seed round, first reported by TechCrunch AI, included participation from Conviction, A*, Valkyrie and others alongside lead investor Index Ventures.

Should users be worried about how their votes are used?

Not urgently, but it is worth knowing what you are signing up for. When you use DesignArena, your preferences become data that AI companies purchase. You get a free tool to compare AI outputs; the companies get insight into what millions of real people find appealing. The platform does require a login, so your regional preferences and how they change over time are part of what Intelligence sells.

The market itself carries real risk. Yupp, a competitor with a similar model, shut its doors earlier in 2025 after raising $33 million. It had more than 1.3 million users and paying clients among the large AI labs, but still could not build a sustainable business. Intelligence is betting that focusing on visual design, rather than text, gives it a defensible position that Yupp lacked.

Common questions

What does DesignArena actually do for a regular user?

You describe what you want, pick a format such as a website or an image, and then vote on which AI output looks better in a series of head-to-head comparisons. The platform uses your votes to deliver the best result and, with your permission, sells the aggregated data to AI companies.

Why can't AI companies just test their own models without paying for this?

They can, and they do, but automated tests tend to reward outputs that score well on narrow metrics rather than outputs that humans genuinely prefer. Collecting honest votes from millions of real users is hard to replicate internally, which is why companies are willing to pay for it.

Is $60 million in annual revenue unusual for a startup this young?

For a company that started a few weeks before its founders graduated in 2025, it is a striking figure. For context, LM Arena, which applies a nearly identical approach to written text rather than visuals, raised $150 million in January 2025, just four months after launching its paid product.