Taste Labs raises $18.5M to teach AI "taste"

Taste Labs raises $18.5M in seed funding co-led by CRV and Amplify Partners to build a data layer that teaches generative AI models to recognize good design.

Emerging from stealth, startup Taste Labs has secured an $18.5 million seed round, co-led by CRV and Amplify Partners. Its founder, Thais Castello Branco, a former growth lead at startup Exa, encapsulates the mission in one phrase: “ending AI slop”, referring to generative outputs that are technically correct but soulless.

The company does not generate visuals itself: it builds the data and tooling layer that aims to make a previously vague question measurable, “is this design successful and on-brand?”, starting with design. The rationale: before helping a model produce beautiful images, it must first be taught to discard the failures—those identifiable by jarring colors, text that falls back into corporate jargon, or video with inconsistent movement.

This infrastructure targets two audiences. To frontier labs, with whom Taste Labs claims to already be working, it provides post-training data, RL environments, and evaluations to imbue their models with a sense of design. To application and agent developers, it provides the means to frame a brand’s style and verify outputs, so that their agents deliver consistent and on-brand designs.