New types of design tools, such as Perpexity’s Visual Electric, Figma’s Weavy, Flora, and Krea, have become popular over the past few years thanks to AI. These tools promise to leverage AI to help product teams, including designers, iterate on variations quickly.
Dessn, a new design startup currently backed by $6 million, believes design tools that don’t allow you to work directly with the codebase 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 costs. To do this, we abstract away the dependencies needed to run our codebase locally. Because Dessn runs in a production environment, the company says it makes it easy for designers to hand over their work to developers.
Current customers include teams at healthcare company Color, voice AI company Wispr, and fintech Mercury.
The company, founded by Gabriella Hachem 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 thesis was that code was going to become a commodity, and in a world where code is insanely cheap, you just get more software, and design becomes the differentiator,” Cheema told TechCrunch over the phone.
This design tool is not built for zero-based ideation, where you can try new ideas, like Vercel’s Lovable or v0. Rather, Dessn says it’s only useful for teams that have an existing codebase and want to iterate on it.
Cheema noted that the difficult part for Dessn was building an infrastructure that could run the codebase on a variety of backend architectures without the need for developers.
With low setup costs, companies that adopt Dessn don’t have to immediately migrate away from their design tools.
“One of the great things about Dessn is that there are no switching costs. You don’t have to remove all of Figma, you don’t have to come to Dessn in every case. You can use it in one project and then use it in another. That’s kind of what we’re doing. And sharing Dessn links is very easy, but you can’t use Cursor or Claude Code. That’s not possible,” Hachem said.
Dessn, like other AI tools, can prompt the creation of new designs. However, some designers may prefer an old-fashioned toolbar for moving objects. But startups don’t think that’s necessary.
Hachem said that she and her co-founders are token maximalists (people who spend more tokens to get results even if the cost is higher) and prefer to launch toolbars for specific contexts rather than maintain static toolbars.
In the age of AI, tools often work together to easily move data from one place to another as part of task automation.
At this time, Dessn does not have any integrations. But if you plan to integrate tools like Slack, you can call up Dessn and ask the tool to create a prototype based on your ongoing discussions. Another tool you might find useful to integrate is a meeting note-taking tool like Granola, which allows you to feed in meeting discussions and create designs. However, the company said one integration it doesn’t want to do is Figma, because it believes it would take teams out of production and it goes against Dessn’s philosophy.
Dessn lets you compile one repository for free and try five prompts a week to help clients experience the tool. After that, it will start at $39 per user per month, which unlocks faster limits based on level, public links, and the ability to opt out of AI training.
Jordan Crook, partner at Betaworks and former TechCrunch editor, said Dessn would be the tool Figma builds on if it launches today.
“Dessn is the only product that has perfect fidelity within the code base/production, rather than designing it and converting it to code or prompting it through a design system. Additionally, Dessn is built to be a really fun, almost emotional experience for users, rather than just a utility,” Crook told TechCrunch via email.
The company currently has four employees and plans to stay small, but plans to add a few more people to the team.
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