Intelligence, an innovative AI startup founded by Grace Li and Kamryn Ohly, has successfully closed a $7.9 million seed funding round to advance its mission. The company is pioneering the development of real-world proving grounds where artificial intelligence models can compete and improve. This new approach aims to move AI beyond simulated environments, allowing systems to learn directly from complex, unpredictable, real-world tasks and user feedback.
From Academic Project to Viral Sensation
The journey of Intelligence began when its founders, Grace Li and Kamryn Ohly, were computer science students at Harvard. Dissatisfied with the clunky and aesthetically unrefined outputs of existing AI models, they developed a simple experiment to test them. This project, called Design Arena, functioned as a comparative game, allowing users to vote on the best designs generated by different AI systems.
What started as a side project quickly transformed into a viral phenomenon after being shared on Reddit, attracting thousands of users overnight. Li and Ohly observed that people were using the platform not just as a benchmark but as a functional tool for creating websites and interfaces. This unexpected user behavior revealed a significant market need for a platform that could identify and provide access to the most effective AI models.
Establishing a New Industry Benchmark
Design Arena's growth has been nothing short of explosive, scaling to 5.5 million users and achieving a profitable annual recurring revenue of $60 million in just six months. The platform's success is driven by its unique ability to serve both consumers and AI developers with a lean team of ten. It provides a universal interface that connects human intent with the most capable AI system for a given task, from web design to video editing.
The platform has become an indispensable tool for the world's leading AI research labs to evaluate and refine their models. Tech giants including Google, OpenAI, Meta, and xAI have utilized Design Arena to test the capabilities of their latest systems, such as Google's Gemini 3. This adoption has solidified Intelligence's role as a critical component in the competitive landscape of AI development, measuring progress through real-world performance.
A Vision for Real-World AI Proving Grounds
The core philosophy behind Intelligence is to remove the "training wheels" from artificial intelligence development. The founders argue that for AI to reach its full potential, it must operate and learn in authentic, uncontrolled environments rather than closed-off simulations. This requires a fundamental shift away from constrained data labeling and towards direct exposure to the complexities of how work is actually accomplished.
Intelligence aims to build the infrastructure for this new paradigm, creating competitive arenas where AI success is transparent, measurable, and impossible to fake. The company contends that the primary limitation for AI is not a lack of raw capability but the absence of effective feedback loops. By providing these proving grounds, Intelligence facilitates a more robust and practical path for AI advancement across various industries.
Expanding Beyond Design into New Frontiers
With the new funding, Intelligence is expanding its vision beyond the creative domain into other complex fields. The company has already launched Prediction Arena, a platform where AI models compete by trading on prediction markets using real money. This initiative tests the ability of AI to make accurate forecasts about real-world events, a notoriously difficult challenge for current systems.
This expansion reflects the founders' belief that any domain where AI models are immature or difficult to evaluate can benefit from their real-world feedback model. The company plans to tackle other areas where models struggle, such as building mobile applications, growing an audience, or designing physical products. Intelligence is positioning itself as the essential distribution and learning layer for AI, connecting models with real-world challenges to accelerate their learning.
The $7.9 million seed investment marks a significant milestone for Intelligence, validating its novel approach to AI development. By creating competitive, real-world environments, Grace Li and Kamryn Ohly are not just building a company but are shaping the future of how AI progresses. Their work promises to make the world's most advanced intelligence more accessible and effective, accelerating the journey toward truly autonomous systems.