DesignArena’s parent company, Intelligence, has closed a $7.9 million seed round led by Index Ventures, with Conviction, A*, and Y Combinator participating. The team is only 10 people, yet the company says annualized recurring revenue went from $5 million to $60 million in the past six months. The platform now has 5.5 million users in more than 190 countries.
The idea is a sort of blind taste test for AI. Multiple models tackle the same task, their names are hidden, and a human picks the best version. Each session randomly pulls four models and ranks them through five rounds of head-to-head comparisons, covering webpages, images, video, and games.
Users can compare models for free, while AI companies pay for the human evaluation results and preference data to benchmark and improve their models.