Dessn Raises $6M to Let Designers Prototype in Real Code

Jan de Vries · 2026-05-12

London-based AI startup Dessn just closed a $6 million seed round to solve one of the biggest headaches in product development: the gap between design and production. Instead of forcing designers to work in mockups and screenshots that developers then have to translate into code, Dessn lets product teams design, prototype, and explore directly inside their actual codebase. No local setup, no IDE, no technical barrier. ### The Funding Round The round was led by Connect Ventures, with participation from Betaworks, N49P, and other leading funds. Pietro Bezza, Managing Partner at Connect Ventures, said: "The best product founders are overly technical and bold. They build products that let users express themselves in the ways they actually want to work. We are proud to partner with Gabriella and Nim in their mission to reinvent product building." ### What Makes Dessn Different Founded in 2024 by Gabriella Hachem and Nim Cheema, Dessn is an AI design-in-production platform. The core idea is simple but powerful. "Every other AI design tool tries to recreate product. Dessn brings users into the real thing – your actual app, your actual components, your actual design system – and lets designers and product managers prototype directly on top of it. Together, with zero technical setup," the company says. Most product teams lose time and fidelity because designers work in mocks while developers work in code. Users experience the product in production, and those three worlds rarely align. Dessn claims to flip the model entirely. ### Solving the Localhost Problem Historically, the only way to access a production environment was to know how to code, set up a local environment, and interact through a developer's interface. Dessn calls this "the localhost problem." Instead of starting in a design tool and translating back into code, Dessn starts from the codebase and builds a design environment around it. Designers and PMs create prototypes using their company's actual components and design system, without ever opening an IDE or running code locally. ### Security That Matters Security is a big concern when giving any tool access to your codebase. Dessn is SOC2 Type II certified. Each project runs in its own isolated microVM and is not trained on user data. The platform never writes, modifies, or pushes code back to your repo. It only requests read-only access to your codebase, and you approve exactly what gets shared. ### Who's Using It Teams at Color, Wispr, Mercury, and others already use Dessn to prototype directly in production. Some users spend over five hours a day inside the platform. ### What's Next Gabriella Hachem shared a fascinating vision for where this is headed: "LLMs are non-deterministic: the same input can produce many different, valid outputs. That means your product isn't a single fixed thing. It's a space of possibilities. Once Dessn can render your components and design system, every possible version of your product already exists in the model. The job becomes to explore it, which is the most fun part of building." For product teams tired of the design-to-development handoff grind, Dessn offers a fresh approach that keeps everyone working in the same reality: the real app.