Arcada Labs
Arcada Labs builds 'portals' to bridge AI in the real world, focusing on distilling and understanding the human experience by turning subjective human traits like taste and aesthetic judgment into measurable data.
Founding Story
The three founders are best friends from Harvard who initially started building an AI game engine for one-shot games. They pivoted after discovering that benchmarking visual 'taste' and aesthetics was more exciting to users than their original concept. They interviewed for Y Combinator the week of their Harvard graduation in June 2025 and were accepted into the Summer 2025 batch. The founders recognized that AI design tools were in an 'uncanny valley' territory and that state-of-the-art models often fail at basic design tasks.
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Leadership
Founders
Grace Li
CEO; Harvard Computer Science and Neuroscience graduate (Class of 2025); Previously Software Engineer at Apple working on Photos, Memory Creation, and Apple Intelligence; Selected to demo live to Craig Federighi (CTO of Apple); Best friends with co-founders from Harvard
Kamryn Ohly
CTO; Harvard Computer Science and Education graduate (Class of 2025); Previously Software Engineer at Apple; MLH Top 50 Hackers 2021; Best friends with co-founders from Harvard
Jayden Personnat
Chief AI/ML; Harvard Computer Science and Statistics graduate; Previously worked at Nvidia; Best friends with co-founders from Harvard
Executive Team
Grace Li
Co-Founder & CEO
Harvard CS and Neuroscience (2025); Previously SWE at Apple on Photos, Memory Creation, and Apple Intelligence
Kamryn Ohly
Co-Founder & CTO
Harvard CS and Education (2025); Previously SWE at Apple; MLH Top 50 Hackers 2021
Business Model
Revenue Model
Planning to offer 'version testing as a service' to companies needing to quantify aesthetic improvements in their products between builds. Free public benchmarking platform with potential enterprise/private evaluation services.
Target Markets
- AI model developers and labs
- Software developers and frontend engineers
- UI/UX designers
- AI companies building generative design tools
- Product teams needing aesthetic validation
- Researchers studying human taste and preference
- Benchmarking AI model performance on design and aesthetics
- Comparing visual capabilities of different AI models
- Discovering which AI is best for specific tasks (landing pages, 3D models, logos)
- Version testing as a service for companies needing to quantify aesthetic improvements
- Pressure-testing AI model usability and aesthetics at scale
- Evaluating AI prediction capabilities in financial and forecasting scenarios
History & Milestones
Launched Prediction Arena powered by Kalshi, evaluating AI models' ability to predict the future through prediction markets
Founders interviewed for Y Combinator the week of their Harvard graduation; accepted into YC Summer 2025 batch
Initial launch with Show HN on Hacker News
Official Launch HN: Design Arena; reached 47,000 users across 136 countries within first four weeks
Expanded benchmark from ~25 LLM models to 54 LLM models, plus 12 image models, 4 video models, 22 audio models, and 22 vibe-coding tools
1 AI Tool by Arcada Labs
Design Arena
6moCrowdsourced benchmark for AI‑generated design. Users vote on head‑to‑head outputs (web UI, images, video, audio) to rank models by human preference.
