Fundraising Fox
Design Arena
YC S25San Francisco, US · Founded 2025 · 3 employees · 7 known investors
Find your way into Design Arena
Sign up to see every warm intro you have to Design Arena
- Paths you didn't know you had: your email and LinkedIn already hold routes to the Design Arena team. We find them for you
- 2nd- and 3rd-degree connections: the friend-of-a-friend routes that take hours to manually find through your inbox or LinkedIn
- Answers now, not in days: momentum is everything in a raise. Skip asking around whether someone knows someone
Days of research, done the moment you sign in, with every route ranked by how warm it is.
Design Arena is a platform that evaluates and ranks AI models' design and UI generation capabilities through crowdsourced pairwise comparisons. Users vote on anonymized outputs from competing models to build community-driven leaderboards of AI performance.
Also known as Arcada Labs Incorporated · Arcada · Arcada, Design Arena, Arcada
AI & Machine LearningConsumerDeveloper ToolsSector AgnosticDesignCrowdsourcingAIUnited States of AmericaAmerica / Canada
Founders & leadership· Y Combinator alumni (S25)
Design Arena was founded in 2025 by Grace Li and Kamryn Ohly.
Investors · 7
Y Combinatorlisted by Y CombinatorSan Francisco · $500K
How we know: the Y Combinator directory · open dataset · 5k.vc investor directory · Not right? Tell us
.jpeg)
Index VenturesreportedSan Francisco · $540K – $10.8M
How we know: techcrunch.com · Not right? Tell us
ValkyriereportedSunnyvale
How we know: techcrunch.com · Not right? Tell us
Also in the syndicate · 1
A*
Funding
SEC filings, press & company announcements- Undisclosed amountseed roundAug 2026
Index Ventures (lead), A*, Conviction, Valkyrie
Source ↗
Source: company announcements and press reports — follow each round's link for the claim.
Related companies · 10
ArenaArena.ai is a platform for exploring and interacting with frontier AI models; user conversations may be shared with AI providers for research purposes.
CentaurCentaur produces high-quality training and evaluation datasets for AI models by turning data annotation into a competitive process where human experts and AI compete. It targets teams building and evaluating machine learning models.
Hugging FaceHugging Face is a collaboration platform that hosts and provides access to machine learning models, datasets, and applications. It offers both open-source tools for the ML community and paid compute and enterprise solutions for teams building AI applications.
DinesafeDineSafe crowdsources food safety reports and provides data tools and systems for real-time detection and prevention of foodborne illness outbreaks. Its surveillance platform serves food industry companies, public health agencies, and consumers.
LLM Statsllm-stats.com provides open, reproducible evaluation and benchmarking infrastructure for large language models and AI systems. The platform aggregates 200+ benchmarks and enables performance comparisons across frontier AI models to support informed decision-making by researchers, enterprises, and model developers.
HubHub operates a data collection and annotation platform that gathers real-world data from physical environments to train embodied AI and robotics models. The company manages a global network of verified small and medium-sized businesses across multiple sectors to capture training data through a standardized pipeline.
Design CrowdDesign.com is an online creative marketplace that helps startups, businesses, and entrepreneurs find and create logos. It also owns and operates DesignCrowd, a custom design marketplace.
PlaymentPlayment is a fully managed data labeling platform that produces annotated training data for computer vision models, supporting image and video annotation types such as bounding boxes, cuboids, polygons, and polylines. It serves companies and research institutions in autonomous vehicles, drones, mapping, satellite imagery, precision agriculture, retail, and sports analytics.
Canva, Inc.Design platform; Blackbird invested when it was just an idea and in every round since.
FigmaFigma is a collaborative design platform that enables teams to create apps, websites, and products through shared design tools integrated with development workflows and AI-powered design assistance.
Companies working in the same space as Design Arena.
Legal entities · 1
corporate structureArcada Labs Incorporated
In the news
Frequently asked questions
- What does Design Arena do?
- Design Arena is a platform that evaluates and ranks AI models' design and UI generation capabilities through crowdsourced pairwise comparisons. Users vote on anonymized outputs from competing models to build community-driven leaderboards of AI performance.
- Who founded Design Arena?
- Design Arena was founded by Grace Li, Kamryn Ohly in 2025.
- Who are Design Arena's investors?
- Design Arena's investors include Hawk Hill Ventures, Vela Partners, Y Combinator, Conviction, Index Ventures, Valkyrie.
- Where is Design Arena headquartered?
- Design Arena is headquartered in San Francisco, US.