Bio
Thais Castello Branco is the founder and CEO of Taste, building the taste infrastructure layer for AI across subjective domains, starting with design. Taste works with frontier labs on post-training data and RL environments, and with app-layer companies to improve and evaluate generations via their API. Taste recently closed $18.5M in seed funding, led by Amplify and CRV, and is hiring across engineering and ML research.
Sessions (2)
Additional Speaker Details
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Thais Castello Branco is founder and CEO of Taste (Taste Labs), which builds annotation and evaluation infrastructure to give AI models aesthetic judgment — the layer between raw generation and outputs that feel right. The company came out of stealth in June 2026 with an $18.5M seed (co-led by CRV and Amplify Partners) on a mission to 'end AI slop.' Her session offers a practitioner perspective on why subjective quality is a frontier for AI post-training, grounded in her prior work leading growth at AI search company Exa.
Speaking style
Recent talks (1)
Recent writing (1)
- Not Everyone Has Taste — But What Even Is It? · blog · Jan 2026
Podcasts & interviews (3)
- What happens to search in an AI era? · Today in Tech (Computerworld) · Jul 2025
- Building Search for AI Agents with Exa · Talking AI · Sep 2025
- S3 | E24 | Building the AI-First Search Engine of the Future with Thais Branco @ Exa · ThinkData Podcast · Sep 2025