Taste Raises $18.5M Seed to Build AI Infrastructure for Aesthetic and Design Judgment

Taste, a San Francisco-based AI infrastructure startup, has closed an $18.5M seed round co-led by CRV and Amplify to tackle what it calls "subjective domains"—the gap between AI outputs that are technically correct and those that feel genuinely good. The company is building tooling and data infrastructure to help AI models and agents measure, classify, and codify aesthetic quality, starting with design, so that creative outputs can be evaluated and improved on dimensions like taste and visual style rather than just factual accuracy.

Taste positions itself as a hybrid research lab and infrastructure product company, serving both frontier model labs and app-layer developers and coding agents. Its products target two layers: post-training data and capabilities for foundation models, and context, evaluation, and verification tools for agent and application builders. The company frames its mission as making "the unverifiable verifiable"—moving subjective creative judgment into a form that AI systems can learn from and act on.