Intelligence

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.