DesignArena creators raise $7.9 million to bring taste to AI models

As co-founder Grace Li tells it, her company started a few weeks before graduation in 2025, with a handful of college friends trying to make their AI game engine work. The models could make functional games, but none of the games were fun — which raised the interesting question, how can you tell if a game will be fun?

There was no substitute for human judgment, they decided, and soon they were brainstorming ways to get honest human feedback at scale.