New types of design tools, such as Perpexity-owned Visual Electric, Figma-owned Weavy, Flora, and Krea, have soared in popularity in the past few years, thanks to artificial intelligence. These tools are based on the promise that, using AI, a product team with designers can quickly iterate on variations.
New design firm Dessn, now backed by $6 million in funding, believes that design tools that don’t allow you to work directly on your code base can limit your ability to imagine new workflows and features.
That’s why Dessn has developed technology that allows startups to run their codebases in the cloud with no setup cost. To do this, it removes dependencies that make it necessary to run the code base locally. Since Dessn operates in a production environment, it is easier for designers to hand off their work to developers, the startup says.
Current clients include teams at health company Color, voice AI company Wispr, and fintech Mercury.
The company, founded by Gabriella Hashim and Nim Cheema, today announced a $6 million funding round led by Connect Ventures, with participation from Betaworks and N49P.
“When we started the company two years ago, our whole thesis was: [that] “Code will be commoditized – and in a world where code is insanely cheap, you’ll get more software, and then design becomes a way to differentiate,” Cheema told TechCrunch over a phone call.
A design tool is not designed for holistic thinking, like Lovable or v0 by Vercel, where you can try out new ideas. Instead, Dessn says it’s only useful for teams that have an existing code base and want to iterate on.
Cheema pointed out that the difficult part for Dessn is building an infrastructure capable of running code bases with different back-end architectures, without needing a developer to get started.
Due to the low cost of setup, companies adopting Dessn don’t have to migrate from their design tool right away.
“The one great thing about Dessn is that we don’t create switching costs,” Hashim said. “It’s not like you have to give up Figma completely now, and you have to come to Dessn for everything. You can go in and use it for one project and then for another project. That’s kind of what we’re seeing happen. And it’s very easy to share a Dessn link, which isn’t possible with Cursor or Claude Code.”
Dessn, like other AI tools, lets you direct your way into creating new designs. However, some designers may prefer to use older toolbars to move things around. But the startup doesn’t think that’s necessary.
Hashim said she and her co-founder are token extremists – people who spend more tokens to reach a result even if it costs more – and prefer to run a toolbar for a specific context rather than keep one static.
In the age of artificial intelligence, tools often try to work with each other to move data from one place to another easily as part of task automation.
Currently, Dessn does not have any integrations. But it plans to integrate tools like Slack, where you can call up Dessn and ask the tool to create prototypes based on ongoing discussions. Another tool you think might be useful to incorporate is a meeting note taking tool like Granola, which can feed discussions from the meeting to create designs. However, the company said that one integration it doesn’t want to do is with Figma, because it believes that would take teams away from production, and goes against the spirit of Dessn.
Dessn lets you put together one repository for free and try out five claims per week to let customers try out the tools. Plans then start at $39 per user per month, unlocking more fast limits, based on level, public links and the ability to opt out of AI training.
Jordan Crook, Betaworks partner (and former TechCrunch editor), said Dessn would be a tool built by Figma if the latter launched today.
“Dessn is the only product that has perfect fidelity within the codebase/production, rather than trying to design it into code, or requiring it via the design system. Additionally, Dessn is designed to be a truly delightful and emotional experience for users, not just a utility,” Crook told TechCrunch via email.
The company currently has four people, and although it intends to stay small, it plans to add a few more people to the team.
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