Intelligence, a startup building real-world testing environments for AI, has secured a $7.9 million seed round led by Index Ventures. Founded by former Harvard students Grace Li and Kamryn Ohly, the company aims to accelerate AI progress through direct, competitive feedback. This investment will fuel the expansion of their platform pitting AI systems against each other in practical applications.
From Hackathon Project to Industry Benchmark
The concept for Intelligence originated when founders Grace Li and Kamryn Ohly grew frustrated with the poor design quality of AI outputs. While building a game engine, they recognized a need for better evaluation methods beyond technical benchmarks. This led them to create an experiment to directly compare the aesthetic and functional outputs of various AI systems.
Their experiment became Design Arena, a platform allowing users to vote on preferred AI-generated designs. After being shared on Reddit, the tool went viral, attracting thousands of users overnight and revealing an unexpected use case. People began using it not just for comparison but as a functional product to generate high-quality designs for projects.
Design Arena quickly became an indispensable evaluation tool for leading AI labs like Google, OpenAI, and Meta to test new models. Its success established it as an industry benchmark and a universal interface between human intent and AI capabilities. The platform provides the critical feedback needed to refine and improve next-generation AI systems.
A New Paradigm for AI Development
Intelligence is founded on the principle that AI must move beyond controlled training environments to realize its potential. The founders believe current systems are too constrained and lack exposure to the complexities of real-world tasks. Their mission is to build "proving grounds" where autonomous AI can be deployed, measured, and improved in open settings.
The company's rapid growth underscores the market demand for its approach, having scaled to 5.5 million users. It impressively grew its annual recurring revenue from $5 million to $60 million in just six months. This was achieved profitably with a small, efficient team of ten, highlighting the platform's scalability and value.
Expanding its vision, Intelligence launched Prediction Arena to test AI models in financial forecasting. This new platform has AI systems trade on prediction markets with real money, measuring their ability to accurately predict real-world events. It applies the company's core feedback model to a new domain where AI performance is difficult to evaluate.
Investor Confidence and Future Outlook
The $7.9 million seed round highlights strong investor confidence in the company's mission and its founders. Index Ventures praised Li and Ohly as exceptionally impressive entrepreneurs building at the frontier of AI development. The firm noted the founders' ambition and thoughtful approach as key factors in its decision to lead the investment.
This new capital will accelerate the development of Intelligence's platform as a vital feedback layer for the AI ecosystem. By creating environments where success is transparent and measurable, the company addresses a core bottleneck in AI progress. The funding will enable the team to expand its unique proving grounds into additional complex, real-world domains.
With its new $7.9 million in funding, Intelligence is set to advance its mission of removing the "training wheels" from artificial intelligence. The success of Design Arena has validated the power of real-world feedback loops for improving AI capabilities. By creating these competitive arenas, the company is shaping a future where AI learns and operates effectively in the real world.