On October 7, 2026, Preference Model, a superintelligence data research company, emerged from stealth and announced the completion of a $16 million seed financing led by a16z. SignalFire, South Park Commons, and Scale Angels also participated in the round, as did angel investors including Dr. Fei-Fei Li, Dr. Ian Goodfellow, and Julian Schrittwieser. Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati advised Preference Model on the transaction.

Additionally, Preference Model announced that they are open-sourcing Karotte, its framework for building robust reinforcement learning (RL) environments that inherently mitigate reward hacks. Over the past year, the company built RL environments for several frontier labs, and Karotte has been hardened through over a million evaluation runs and controlled red-teaming.

The Wilson Sonsini team that advised Preference Model includes Yokum Taku, Avi Emanuel, and MJ Han.

For more information, please see Preference Model’s blog post.