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Taste Labs, announced by Thais Castello Branco on 2026-06-16 with an $18.5M seed…

Brief

Taste Labs, announced by Thais Castello Branco on 2026-06-16 with an $18.5M seed co-led by CRV and Amplify Partners, aims to 'end AI slop' by making creative judgment measurable. The startup focuses on design first and pursues a two-pronged technical strategy: post-training data and RL environments for foundation models, plus context/verification tooling for agents.

Source evidence

There is no such thing as taste, but there might be a way to measure it. Ultimately, measurability rather than taste, soul, curation, or judgment was always the binding constraint on AI scaling into new creative domains.

Thais Castello Branco (@thaiscbranco_)

We’re excited to introduce Taste Labs.

Our mission is to end AI slop. We’re building the data and infrastructure layer to give AI models and agents taste.

And today we’re coming out of stealth, announcing our $18.5M seed funding, co-led by @CRV and @AmplifyPartners

AI has nailed objective domains and made it easy to generate anything. But it still feels off. Now, the challenge is judgement. What fits, what feels like you, what’s GREAT. This requires turning a fuzzy, subjective domain into something we can measure and codify. We’re starting with design.

There are two sides to cracking this, the foundation model layer and the agent layer:

  • We’ve already been working with the top frontier labs to evaluate and improve their models, crafting the right post-training data and RL environments.
  • We’ve also been working with app-layer companies to build the context and verification tools for their agents to produce better, more on-brand, more creative outputs.

We want a future where AI feels right.

If you’re passionate about this mission, join us!

Video

— https://nitter.net/thaiscbranco_/status/2066912871649574945#m