Arcada Labs

Arcada Dev (Arcada Labs)

Arcada Dev is the product studio behind Arcada Labs — a team building “creative environments” that turn fuzzy human traits (like taste, aesthetic judgment, and play) into something measurable. Their bet is simple: if we can’t measure what humans prefer, we can’t reliably improve AI that makes things for humans.

What Arcada Dev builds

Arcada Labs frames its work as three “arenas”:

• Taste → Design Arena — measuring what “looks right”
• Sound → Audio Arena — measuring what “sounds right”
• Play → (coming soon) — measuring what “feels right”

Think of these as public training grounds for subjectivity: instead of debating taste endlessly, you run controlled matchups, collect votes, and let the data tell you where models actually land.

Flagship: Design Arena

Design Arena is a crowdsourced benchmark for AI-generated design — spanning real-world creative tasks (like UI/front-end design, images, audio, video, and more) and evaluating them with live, organic user feedback.

The core mechanic (simple, but sharp)

Design Arena uses blind, head-to-head tournaments:

• Two model outputs face off on the same prompt/task
• The model names are hidden to reduce brand bias
• Users vote for the better result
• Those matchups roll up into a public leaderboard

How ranking works (in plain English)

Every vote is treated like a “match.” Over many matches, Design Arena estimates how likely each model is to beat another and converts that into a rating you can compare across the field (presented in an Elo-style form).

Why it exists

LLMs can ace tests and proofs, but design failures are painfully human: unreadable contrast, awkward layouts, weird spacing, “technically correct” outputs that still feel wrong.

Design Arena exists because there hasn’t been a standard way to pressure-test taste, usability, and aesthetics at scale. No benchmark → no consistent feedback loop → slow improvement.

Traction

Design Arena gained significant early adoption, drawing tens of thousands of users across well over a hundred countries within weeks of launch, and later expanding to well over a hundred thousand users worldwide.

Mission & posture

Arcada’s posture is refreshingly direct:

• Build grounded, real-user evaluation instead of vibes and anecdotes
• Make the benchmark public so progress is visible (and comparable)
• Use the leaderboard as a mirror that reveals limitations, not a trophy case

Design Arena also presents a strong “access” stance: tomorrow’s creative evaluation tools should be broadly available, not gated behind enterprise walls.

Team

Arcada Labs is led by a small founding team with deep technical roots and a shared background, including experience building at Apple. Public-facing leadership includes:

• Grace Li (CEO)
• Kamryn Ohly (CTO)

Funding & company status

Arcada Labs is a 2025-founded company, backed by an accelerator/incubator round, and associated with Y Combinator.

Contact

Arcada maintains a founder-facing contact channel for leaderboard nominations, partnerships, and community collaboration.