Leading the $18.5 Million Seed in Taste
By Veronica Orellana, Reid Christian and Mia Krishnamurthy
We couldn’t be more excited to lead Taste’s $18.5 million seed round. This team is just getting started.
We’d been hearing about Thais for a while from many folks in our network. When that many people are talking about someone, you can’t ignore it.
Thais was a super early hire at Exa. She led the buildout of their early Websets product, ran marketing, and built data partnerships. Immersed in the world of AI, she watched as slop took over website design, marketing copy and as most outputs collapsed to the mean in terms of style, producing average outputs. She became obsessed with one thing: ending AI slop.
AI has made it easy to create almost anything, but it’s still incredibly hard to create something great. Thais believes the missing piece is that AI needs to feel right, not just be technically correct.
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Enter Taste. As the name suggests, Taste is the infrastructure layer for “taste,” built to end AI slop. They’re tackling this from two sides:
- Working with foundation labs to improve their models with post-training data and RLE.
- Working with app layer companies to build tools for their agents.
At the core, is the ability to fundamentally judge what does “great” mean in a domain where there isn’t a single right answer. This requires crafting a fundamentally different way to represent the attributes about these data types, and the preferences of tastemakers.
Plenty of companies have made progress in verifiable domains. The harder, more interesting problem is carrying that rigor into unverifiable domains, where human judgment still has to be in the loop. Making subjective domains measurable is the gap Taste is closing, starting with design.
When we met Thais, it was clear she was built to solve this problem. She has a magnetic energy, and we were struck by her rare mix of technical depth and commercial instinct. In the nine months since starting Taste, she’s assembled a sharp team of 18 across research, ML, engineering, design and ops. They’ve already been working with frontier labs and app layer companies and are gearing up to rapidly scale.
If you’re excited about building at the intersection of design, data and infra, come join Taste.
Welcome to the CRV family Thais!
