New types of design tools, such as Perplexity-owned Visual Electric, Figma-owned Weavy, Floraand Krea, have risen in popularity in the last few years, thanks to AI. These tools bank on the promise that, with AI, a product team with designers can iterate through variations quickly.
A new design startup, Dessnnow backed by $6 million in funding, believes that design tools that don’t let you work directly on your codebase can limit you from being able to imagine new workflows and features.
That’s why Dessn developed technology that allows startups to run their codebases in the cloud without any setup cost. To do so, it abstracts away the dependencies that make it necessary for a codebase to run locally. Because Dessn works in a production environment, it’s easier for designers to hand off their work to developers, the startup says.
Current customers include teams at health company Color, voice AI company Wispr, and fintech Mercury.
Founded by Gabriella Hachem and Nim Cheema, Dessn today announced its $6 million funding round was led by Connect Ventures, with participation from Betaworks and N49P.
“When we started the company two years ago, our whole thesis was [that] the code is going to get commoditized — and in a world where code is insanely cheap, you just get a lot more software, and then design becomes a way that’s a differentiator,” Cheema told TechCrunch over a call.
The design tool is not built for ground-up ideation, such as a Lovable or v0 by Vercel, where you can play around with new ideas. Instead, Dessn says it’s useful only for the teams that have an existing codebase and want to iterate on it.
Cheema noted that the tough part for Dessn was to build an infrastructure that is capable of running codebases with different back-end architectures, without needing a developer to get started.
Because of the low setup cost, companies that adopt Dessn don’t have to move over from their design tool right away.
“The one thing that’s great about Dessn is that we don’t create switching costs. It’s not like you have to drop all of Figma now, and you have to come to Dessn for everything. You can come in and use it for one project and then another one. That’s kind of what we’re seeing happen. And it’s so easy to share a Dessn link, which isn’t possible with Cursor or Claude Code,” Hachem said.
Dessn, like other AI tools, lets you prompt your way into creating new designs. However, some designers might like old-school toolbars to move things around. But the startup doesn’t think that is necessary.
Hachem said that she and her co-founder are token maximalists — people who would spend more tokens to get to a result even if it costs more — and would rather spin up a toolbar for a particular context than keep a static one.
In the age of AI, tools are often trying to work with each other to move data from one place to another easily as part of task automation.
At the moment, Dessn doesn’t 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 it thinks could be useful to integrate is a meeting notetaker like Granola, which can feed it discussions from a meeting to create designs. However, the company said that one integration it doesn’t want to do is Figma, because it thinks that would take teams away from production, and it goes against Dessn’s ethos.
Dessn lets you compile one repository for free and try out five prompts per week to let clients get a taste of the tools. Its plans then start from $39 per user per month, which unlocks more prompt limits, and based on the tier, public links, and the ability to opt out of AI training.
Betaworks partner (and former TechCrunch editor) Jordan Crook said that Dessn would be a tool Figma built if the latter started today.
“Dessnis the only product that has perfect fidelity within the code base/production, rather than trying to design and turn it into code, or prompt via design system.Plus, Dessnis built to be a truly delightful and almost emotional experience for users, rather than just a utility,” Crook told TechCrunch over email.
The company has four people currently, and while it intends to stay small, it plans to add a few more people to the team.
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