New types of design tools, such as Perpexity-owned Visual Electric, Figma-owned Weavy, Flora, and 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, Dessn, now 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.
[embedded content]
Founded by Gabriella Hachem and Nim Cheema, the company 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.
Image Credits: DessnImage Credits:Dessn
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 backend 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 …