Intelligence secures $7.9 million to monetize human taste in AI

The company’s platform uses a straightforward interface where users rank visual outputs in "A vs. B" comparisons, generating high-quality data that helps frontier labs refine their media-generating models. While casual users interact with the site to refine their own prompts, the real business lies in the enterprise sector. Intelligence provides these labs with a continuous stream of human judgment, a commodity that is increasingly vital as automated benchmarks prove prone to manipulation. According to Li, the site currently generates $60 million in annual recurring revenue, a figure that highlights the industry's desperate need for human-led evaluation.

Monday’s $7.9 million seed round, led by Index Ventures with backing from Conviction and A*, provides the capital to scale these operations. The platform’s ability to track shifting aesthetic preferences across different continents offers a unique competitive advantage in a crowded market. Despite the high-profile failure of competitors like Yupp, which shuttered after raising $33 million, Intelligence appears to be riding a wave of industry demand similar to the success seen by the text-focused LM Arena. For now, the challenge remains turning a popular crowdsourced tool into a sustainable, long-term business as the landscape for AI evaluation tools continues to shift.