Thais Castello Branco is the Founder and CEO of Taste Labs, an AI research and infrastructure company on a mission to eliminate AI slop by building the data and evaluation layer that teaches AI to understand taste, judgment, and style in subjective domains like design.

Originally from Brazil, Thais earned a B.A. in Econometrics and Quantitative Economics from the University of Chicago, was accepted to Harvard Business School's MBA 2+2 program, and chose to stay in tech, later joining the Latitud Fellowship in 2024.

Thais champions a measurement-first philosophy, arguing that generating content at scale is easy but making it original, brand-faithful, and contextually appropriate requires fundamentally better evaluation and training infrastructure.

Prior to founding Taste Labs, Thais was part of the founding team at Exa, the AI search company, where she served as Head of Strategy and Marketing and launched key products including Websets; she also co-founded Creio before pivoting to build Taste Labs.

Taste Labs launched publicly in June 2026 with an $18.5M seed round co-led by CRV and Amplify Partners, has analyzed over two million websites to quantify design homogenization, and in August 2026 launched a research fellowship on model creativity and human preferences.