Design Arena Launches: #1 Benchmark for AI Design

By
·
February 9, 2026

Design Arena recently launched!

Launch YC: Design Arena - #1 Benchmark for AI Design

"Attracted 47K+ users across 136 countries in 4 weeks."

📣 TLDR Design Arena is the first crowdsourced benchmark for AI-generated design. They evaluate how models perform on real-world design tasks - frontend, audio, image, video and more - with live, organic users. It’s the first step of their broader mission at Arcada Labs to distill and understand the human experience.
Image Credits: Design Arena

Founded by Grace Li, Kamryn Ohly & Jayden Personnat

💛 Team

The founders are all best friends from Harvard!

Jayden Personnat (pictured in the back): Chief AI/ML — Harvard Computer Science & Statistics, previously at Nvidia.

Kamryn Ohly (pictured on the right): CTO — Harvard Computer Science & Education, previously at Apple.

Grace Li (pictured on the left): CEO — Harvard Computer Science & Neuroscience, previously at Apple.

❌ Problem

LLMs can pass bar exams and win IMO gold, but they still generate UIs with white text on a white background.

There’s no standard to measure taste, usability, or aesthetics, and no benchmark means no pressure to improve.

🏆 Solution

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ay89pA_wUHM

At Design Arena they are building the definitive benchmark for AI-generated design.

  • Users vote in real time on model-generated designs.
  • Design Arena computes pairwise comparisons, Elo rankings, and leaderboard scores.
  • Companies can track performance, run private evals, and iterate faster.

Design Arena handles all the hard parts: experimental design, statistical significance, scaling, and integration.

Image Credits: Design Arena

Learn More

🌐 Visit www.designarena.ai to learn more.
🫶  Know someone making a “build-anything” or working at a foundation lab? Design Arena would love to get them on the leaderboard! Send the founders a message here!
👣 Follow Design Arena on LinkedIn & X.