Dessn, Startup Building AI Design Tools for Production Codebases, Raises $6 Million

Dessn, a startup building AI-powered design tools that work directly with production codebases, has raised $6 million in funding. Connect Ventures led the round. Betaworks and N49P participated. The company announced the funding on May 12, 2026.

Dessn was founded two years ago by Gabriella Hachem and Nim Cheema. The company currently has four people and plans to add a few more while intending to stay small. The startup developed technology that allows startups to run their codebases in the cloud without any setup cost.

It abstracts away the dependencies that make it necessary for a codebase to run locally. Dessn built an infrastructure capable of running codebases with different backend architectures without needing a developer to get started. Current customers of Dessn include teams at health company Color, voice AI company Wispr and fintech Mercury.

The design tool is useful only for teams that have an existing codebase and want to iterate on it. Dessn is not built for ground-up ideation such as a Lovable or v0 by Vercel. "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," Nim Cheema told TechCrunch over a call.

Because Dessn works in a production environment, it is easier for designers to hand off work to developers. The tool lets users prompt their way into creating new designs. It does not rely on old-school toolbars to move elements around.

Gabriella Hachem and her co-founder are token maximalists who would spend more tokens to reach a result even if it costs more. They would rather spin up a toolbar for a particular context than keep a static one. "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," Gabriella Hachem said. Dessn currently has no integrations. It plans to integrate tools like Slack, where users can call up Dessn during discussions to create prototypes.

The company also sees value in integrating a meeting notetaker like Granola to feed discussions from meetings into design creation. Dessn does not want to integrate with Figma because it believes that would pull teams away from production and contradict the startup’s ethos. The service lets users compile one repository for free and try out five prompts per week.

It plans to start from $39 per user per month. That tier unlocks more prompt limits, public links and the ability to opt out of AI training. Betaworks partner Jordan Crook, a former TechCrunch editor, said the product stands apart from alternatives.

"Dessn is 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, Dessn is built to be a truly delightful and almost emotional experience for users, rather than just a utility," he told TechCrunch over email.

TechCrunch reported that new types of AI design tools have risen in popularity in recent years.

Dessn’s approach differs by insisting on direct work inside live production code rather than generating designs that must later be translated.