Taste Labs New York AI taste infrastructure profiles Taste Labs, which emerged from stealth on June 16, 2026 with $18.5 million in seed funding co-led by CRV and Amplify Partners. Founded by former Exa growth lead Thais Castello Branco, the New York company builds data and evaluation infrastructure to give AI models and agents subjective “taste” — starting with design — to combat generic “AI slop” outputs.
Industry positioning
- Frontier lab layer: Supplies preference datasets, reasoning data, rubrics, and reinforcement-learning environments for post-training alignment beyond generic RLHF.
- Application layer: Verification software helping app companies produce on-brand, aesthetically coherent agent outputs.
- Starting domain: Design and visual output — codifying subjective judgment into measurable training signals.
- Team scale: 18 people across research, ML, engineering, design, and ops assembled in nine months per CRV investment post.
Business context
- Mission: “End AI slop” by making fuzzy aesthetic domains measurable — stated in founder’s June 2026 launch post on X.
- Founder background: Branco was an early Exa hire who built Websets, ran marketing, and formed data partnerships before starting Taste.
- Product status: Pre-public-product at launch — operating through infrastructure partnerships with frontier labs and application companies.
- Investor thesis: CRV and Amplify bet that judgment — not generation — is the scarce resource in the 2026 AI stack.
Languages & accessibility
Corporate communications are in English. NYC office accessibility is not confirmed on this desk review.
Location & contact
- Address: NYC — street not listed on tastelabs.ai (Jun 2026 desk review), New York, NY 10010, United States
- Phone: Not published on the public site at last desk review — contact via tastelabs.ai.
- Website: tastelabs.ai
Last verified (desk review): June 2026 — stealth exit, funding, founder, and product thesis verified against CRV Medium, The Source Code, and founder X post; street not published.
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Sources cited for this profile
- Taste Labs — official website (tastelabs.ai)
- The Source Code — $18.5M seed coverage (Jun 2026)
- CRV Medium — lead investor post (Jun 16, 2026)
- Amplify Partners — co-lead investor
- BottleRocket Content — launch analysis (Jun 16, 2026)
- Digg — founder X post republication (Jun 2026)
- Thais Castello Branco — founder biography (CRV post)
- Exa — founder prior employer (Websets, marketing)
- 18-person team — CRV investment post
- Design-first domain — founder launch statements
- Preference datasets and RLE — product thesis (press)
- Frontier lab partnerships — CRV post
- June 16, 2026 stealth exit — multiple press sources